San Francisco Frontiers - French jihadist jailed for life for Islamic State crimes against Yazidis

The Paris Assizes Court found Sabri Essid guilty in absentia of genocide, crimes against humanity and complicity in the crimes, committed between 2014 and 2016 when the jihadists occupied swathes of northern Syria and Iraq.

"Sabri Essid took part in the genocide perpetrated by Islamic State," presiding judge Marc Sommerer told the court.

"Essid became part of the criminal network repeatedly buying and reselling a very large number of Yazidi victims," he said, adding the court judged that the group had "specifically targeted" the Yazidi minority for its religious beliefs.

The Islamic State group regarded the Yazidis, who follow a pre-Islamic faith, as heretics.

Essid, a Frenchman born in 1984 and who joined IS in Syria in 2014, is presumed to have been killed in 2018. But without proof of his death, he was tried and convicted in absentia.

He is accused of buying several Yazidi women at markets and then repeatedly raping them, as well as depriving them of water and food.

IS seized large swathes of Syria and neighbouring Iraq in 2014, declaring a so-called caliphate there.

In August of that year, they murdered thousands of Yazidi men in Iraq's Sinjar province and took into Syria thousands of women and girls to sell them in markets as sex slaves to be abused by jihadists from around the world.

United Nations investigators have qualified these actions as genocide.

- 'Genocidal policy' -

On Thursday, a Yazidi woman who was sold by IS as a sex slave described in stark detail to the Paris court the horrors she endured under jihadist captivity in Syria.

She said she was raped almost daily by her first two owners -- a married Saudi man and then Essid. She was resold to six other men before escaping with her daughter and walking through the night to reach a post manned by Kurdish forces.

Sommerer said on Thursday he had overseen several trials for crimes against humanity but had "never heard before" the atrocities endured by the woman, whose name AFP is withholding to protect her privacy.

Known in Syria as Abu Dojanah al-Faransi, Essid was thought to be close to Jean-Michel and Fabien Clain.

The Clain brothers, now believed to be dead, claimed responsibility on behalf of IS for France's worst ever jihadist attacks in Paris in 2015.

Lawyers had earlier stressed the significance of the Essid trial.

"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 France's Human Rights League.

"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," said Clemence Bectarte, a lawyer representing three Yazidi women survivors and their eight children.

- Trials throughout Europe -

After Essid went to Syria, his wife, their three children and her son from a previous relationship joined him.

In an IS propaganda video released in 2015, Essid is seen pushing his 12-year-old stepson to shoot a Palestinian hostage in the head.

His wife has been jailed since returning to France.

Similar trials have taken place elsewhere in Europe.

In 2021, a German court issued the first ruling worldwide to recognise crimes against the Yazidi community as genocide.

It sentenced an Iraqi man to life in jail on charges that he chained a five-year-old Yazidi girl "house slave" outdoors in heat of up to 50C as punishment for wetting her mattress, leading her to die of thirst.

Last month, a Swedish court 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 IS proto-state in 2019, though isolated cells still operate in the Syrian desert.

Hussein Qaidi, who heads the Kidnapped Yazidi Rescue Office, told AFP last year that IS had abducted 6,416 Yazidis, more than half of whom had since been rescued.

D.Robinson--SFF