According to an Iraqi court, the death penalty, “death by hanging”, was handed down to one of the widows of the slain ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who was accused of committing offenses against Yazidi women held captive by the militant group.
The verdict comes just weeks before a decade since ISIS launched a series of attacks against members of the Yazidi sect in the Sinjar region of northern Iraq in early August 2014, killing and injuring thousands of people, including trafficked and abused women and girls. The United Nations deemed the Yazidi uprising to be a mass murder.
The decision was announced by the Justice Council on Wednesday. Although the announcement does not include the name of the suspect, she was identified as Esma Muhammed by two court officials.
Iraq’s Supreme Judicial Council declared that “the convicted terrorist detained Yazidi women in her house, who were then kidnapped by ISIS militants in the Sinjar district, west of Nineveh province.”
Esma Muhammed was detained in Turkey in 2018. She was accused of working with ISIS and using her home in Mosul to kidnap Yazidi women, who were later captured by ISIS fighters in Sinjar in northern Iraq. An Iraqi security official told the Associated Press that al-Baghdadi’s other wife and daughter are also sentenced to life imprisonment.
Esma Muhammed confessed that the ISIS leaders including her own husband were “obsessed” with women. She also added that she married al-Baghdadi in 1999 and said he was as a normal person who didn’t hold extreme views. But after being arrested by the US military in 2004, his ideology changed.
International Organizations
However, the verdict has been criticized by the survivors of ISIS attacks in Iraq who applied for a UN investigation into ISIS crimes, including the use of chemical weapons. Human rights groups have also expressed concern about the lack of due process in the same ISIS cases and have criticized the executions of too many people convicted of terrorism.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have called on Iraq to put an end on the death penalty, noting that the punishment had been lifted for torture.
Known as one of the most powerful leaders of modern times, al-Baghdadi ruled over much of Iraq and Syria and had built a self-declared “caliphate”. ISIS fighters killed thousands of Yazidi men and forced their women into sexual slavery.
However, al-Baghdadi was slain in a US airstrike in Syria in 2019, which ruined the whole militant group.
