PARIS: A French militant went on trial on Monday in Paris on charges of genocide, the first case in France to tackle atrocities committed against the Yazidi minority during the years-long conflict waged by the Daesh militant group in the Middle East.
Sabri Essid is presumed to have been killed in 2018, but without proof of his death he is being tried in absentia in Paris on charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and complicity in these crimes, committed between 2014 and 2016.
Three women from the Yazidi community, a Kurdish-speaking minority who practice a pre-Islamic faith, are civil parties in the trial, with two expected to take the stand.
Daesh seized large swathes of Syria and neighboring Iraq in 2014, declaring a so-called caliphate.
In August 2014, they murdered thousands of Yazidi men in Iraq’s Sinjar province, and took thousands of women and girls to Syria to sell them in markets as sex slaves to be abused by jihadists from around the world. UN investigators have since qualified these actions as genocide.
Essid, who was born in the southwestern French city of Toulouse in 1984, joined IS in Syria in 2014.
He has been accused of buying several Yazidi women at markets and then repeatedly raping them, as well as depriving them of water and food.
Known in Syria as Abu Dojanah Al-Faransi, he was thought to be close to Jean-Michel and Fabien Clain, who claimed responsibility on behalf of Daesh for France’s worst ever jihadist attacks in Paris in 2015.
The brothers are presumed dead.
“Given that in the past Islamic State fighters believed to be dead have resurfaced, it is essential that this trial take place,” said Patrick Baudouin, a lawyer for the Human Rights League, a French rights organization.
Attorney Clemence Bectarte, who represents the three Yazidi women and their eight children, said the trial must “provide another reading of IS crimes,” usually tried in France as terrorist offenses.
“It is essential that it shed light on the particularly grave abuses committed against civilian populations, and in particular the genocidal policy implemented against the Yazidi population,” she said.
Jailed wife to testify
After Essid headed to Syria, his wife, their three children and her son from a previous relationship joined him.
In an Daesh propaganda video released in 2015, Essid is seen pushing his 12-year-old stepson to shoot a Palestinian hostage in the head.
His wife, who has been jailed since returning to France, is to testify at the trial, which is set to last until Friday.
Similar trials took place in Europe in recent years.
A German court in 2021 issued the first ruling worldwide to recognize crimes against the Yazidi community as genocide.
It sentenced an Iraqi man to life in jail after prosecutors said he and his then-wife “purchased” a Yazidi woman and child as household “slaves” while living in the Iraqi city of Mosul in 2015, which was occupied by Daesh at the time.
He was accused of chaining the five-year-old girl outdoors in heat of up to 50C as punishment for wetting her mattress, leading her to die of thirst.
In another such ruling, a Swedish court last month convicted a 52-year-old woman of genocide for keeping Yazidi women and children as slaves in Syria in 2015.
US-backed forces eventually defeated the Daesh proto-state in 2019, though isolated cells still operate in the Syrian desert.
Hussein Qaidi, who heads the Kidnapped Yazidi Rescue Office, last year told AFP Daesh had abducted 6,416 Yazidis, more than half of whom had since been rescued.
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