A German woman accused of joining ISIL, enslaving Yazidi’s wife | ISIL / ISIS issues

A German woman who traveled to Syria at the age of 15 to join the ISIL (ISIS) army has gone to court accused of supporting and supporting crimes against humanity.

Leonora Messing, now 21, was arraigned in court on Tuesday in the eastern German city of Halle on suspicion that she and her ISIL husband had been enslaved. Yazidi woman in Syria in 2015.

During the trial, which is due to continue until mid-May and is being held without locks, Messing will also be charged with membership of the armed forces and violating arms laws.

The high-profile case has prompted a search in Germany over how a young girl from a small town was trained and involved in ISIL.

Messing fled from his home in Sangerhausen to ISIL-controlled territory in Syria in March 2015.

After arriving in Raqqa, the capital of ISIL in Syria, she became the third German citizen from that region.

Messing’s father, a baker from the German village of Breitenbach, had just learned that his daughter had converted to Islam by opening a disconnected computer and reading her book after she disappeared.

Six days after her disappearance, her father received a message telling her that her daughter had converted and that she had “reached the caliphate”.

“She was a good student,” her father, Maik Messing, told MDR reporter in 2019.

“She used to go to the retirement home to read to the elderly. She took part in the carnival as a jutette. That was the last we saw of many people we know. ”

Messing lived a double life and traveled, unbeknownst to his parents, to a mosque west of Frankfurt, a suburb of intelligence in Germany.

The microphone is visible inside the high security court at District Court Halle [Jens Schlueter/AFP]

He is one of more than 1,150 people who left Germany from 2011 to Syria and Iraq, according to government sources.

His case has attracted a lot of attention because of his childhood, and because his father agreed to a four-year follow-up by a group of journalists from state-run NDR radio.

As part of the report, she announced thousands of messages that she continued to exchange with her daughter, giving her strange insights into daily life under ISIL, and at the end of her attempts to free herself.

Critics allege Messing became involved in human trafficking after her husband “bought” and then “sold” Yazidi’s 33-year-old wife.

Messing, who gave birth to two girls, was detained in a Kurdish-controlled camp in northern Syria.

Reimbursement

In December 2020, he underwent one of four operations bringing 54 people, most of them children, back to Germany.

Although arrested on arrival at Frankfurt airport, Messing was released.

Germany has repeatedly been ordered by its courts to extradite women and children to the armed forces.

A Berlin court ruled in October 2019 that a German woman and her three children be reinstated, stating that the children were upset and should not be separated from their mother.

There are about 61 Germans still in camps in northern Syria, as well as about 30 people with a license in Germany, according to government estimates.

The German court in November was the first in the country give a verdict recognizing the faults of the people of Jazid such as murder, in a decision that proponents have hailed as “the ultimate success” of minorities.

Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking group from northern Iraq, has for years been persecuted by ISIL militants who have killed hundreds of men, raped and imprisoned thousands of women and forced children to become militants.

Women and children march on the Kurdish-run al-Hol camp in Hassakeh district in northeastern Syria, where ISIL foreign troops are stationed. [File: Delil Souleiman/AFP]