BERLIN—Ivana says she was eight years old when she was sold as a sex slave to an American member of Islamic State after the group murdered her parents.
Five years after the terror militia sought to exterminate her fellow Yazidi, a religious minority in Iraq and Syria, Ivana’s testimony and those of hundreds of other victims offer evidence that might help bring Islamic State members to justice in the West.
European and U.S. authorities have struggled to successfully prosecute returning Islamic State members, largely because of the difficulties in collecting evidence of crimes that happened in Iraq and Syria.
But the Yazidi who survived carry detailed accounts of one of the militia’s worst crimes: The attempt to wipe out the religious minority and the mass enslavement of its women and female children. Islamic State interprets Islamic scriptures literally, using them to justify the murder and enslavement of Yazidis, who are adherents of an ancient religion that is neither Muslim, Christian nor Jewish and therefore perceived as subhuman by ideologues of the terror group. Now lawyers, activists and the United Nations are compiling these accounts to build cases against captured militants from the self-styled caliphate.
“He was horribly brutal. He and his wife owned me and another two Yazidi girls,” Ivana, now aged 13, says in a documentary about Yazidi survivors. The film, by a German-Yazidi lawyer, will premiere at the United Nations’ New York headquarters in January and is part of the documentation effort.
Like thousands of Yazidi girls and women, Ivana was sold multiple times on slave markets in Islamic State-controlled territories. More than 5,000 mostly male members of the Yazidi community were murdered in what the U.N. labels a genocide. Around half a million—nearly half of the entire Yazidi population—were displaced, either in Syria and Iraq, like Ivana, who now lives in a refugee camp. Around 3,000 Yazidi women kept as slaves by Islamic State fighters and their wives are still missing. Hundreds of girls around Ivana’s age were forced to have children with their captors. Lamya, now 16, whose testimony is also featured in the documentary, gave birth to three children from two different Islamic State fighters.
In Syria alone, more than 2,000 foreign Islamic State fighters are imprisoned by Kurdish militias. Many of the fighters have wives who Yazidi victims say played a role in terrorizing enslaved women and children. After Turkey started a military campaign against the Kurds in the region in October, some of these captives of European origin fled and made their way back to their home countries.
With more former Islamic State fighters expected to return to Europe and some 500 convicted jihadists due to be freed from European jails in the next two years, several organizations collecting evidence of crimes against the Yazidi are racing to build watertight cases, said Olivier Guitta, director of GlobalStrat, a security consulting firm.
Lack of hard evidence means sentences against Islamic State members and affiliates have so far been light, Mr. Guitta said. Female Islamic State affiliates have tended to receive especially short sentences because most didn’t engage in combat.
Critics of this approach, including the Dutch government in a recent report, argue that jihadi women played a central role in recruiting members, producing and disseminating propaganda, raising funds and indoctrinating children.
Düzen Tekkal, the German-Yazidi filmmaker who directed “Jiyan: A Cry For Life,” is collecting the survivors’ testimonies for future court proceedings. Germany, where Ms. Tekkal is based, now hosts the world’s largest Yazidi diaspora, some 200,000 strong. Members include Nadia Murad, an activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize and met President Trump at the Oval Office earlier this year.
“This is a global and not a national issue: a genocide that happened across borders, the victims and perpetrators of which are now strewn world-wide,” said Ms. Tekkal, who also runs Hawar, a charity helping Yazidi women who survived Islamic State slavery. “Our women are the best weapon against terrorism.”
The world’s first trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed against the Yazidi is taking place in Munich, Germany, where a woman identified only as Jennifer W., due to legal protections granted to crime suspects, was charged with crimes against humanity for allowing the death of a five-year-old slave girl.
According to prosecutors, the defendant and her husband, an Islamic State fighter identified as Taha A.-J., had bought the girl and her mother and at one point chained the child in the sun outside of their house in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, letting her die slowly in the scorching heat.
Taha A.-J. fled Iraq after the demise of Islamic State and lived as a refugee in Greece. He was deported to Germany in October and will become the first person to be charged with participating in the genocide against the Yazidi, according to prosecutors.
Ms. Tekkal and several other Yazidi activists in the West have pushed for an international tribunal to try the crimes of Islamic State because of what they say is the weaknesses of the justice systems in countries such as Iraq and the fact that Western prosecutors are unable to conduct investigations in conflict zones. The U.S. opposes the idea, arguing that international courts are costly and slow and that Islamic State members should be tried in their countries of origin.
Ms. Tekkal’s position is backed by a cross-party group of German politicians, including Markus Grübel, the German government commissioner for international religious freedom, who has called for replicating the international tribunal that tried crimes committed in the Balkans during the Yugoslav civil war in the 1990s.
Nathan A. Sales, the State Department’s coordinator for terrorism, said such a tribunal would cost billions of dollars and take decades to process all of the fighters and pursue their appeals. The tribunal for Yugoslavia opened in 1993 but closed its last case in 2017.
“It’s simply not a viable option to take on that kind of financial burden that would drag out over so many years,” Mr. Sales said in a telephone interview. He added the U.S. would provide evidence gathered by its troops, intelligence agencies and allies in the Middle East.
It is unclear, however, whether national judiciaries will be able to successfully prosecute Islamic State members with that evidence and the Yazidi testimonies. Western courts tend to be protective of the rights of the accused, while courts in the region where the crimes took place have struggled to prosecute Islamic State members.
Natia Navrouzov, a French-Yazidi lawyer working in Iraq, where the worst atrocities took place, said Iraq’s rule of law was in disarray after years of conflict, and the legal system didn’t have the capacity for prosecuting genocide.
Her organization, Yazda, has interviewed hundreds of victims and provided their testimonies to prosecutors in Iraq, Germany, France and elsewhere, but she says national judiciaries in the Middle East won’t be able to proceed without international assistance. Yazda and other organizations are working together with a United Nations investigative team that was set up this year to help investigate the alleged genocide and other crimes by Islamic State, also known as ISIS.
Amal Clooney, a London-based human rights lawyer and wife of the Hollywood actor George Clooney, represents Yazidi victims, including the mother of the child who died in the Munich case against Jennifer W. and her partner. She said the lack of international coordination had already allowed too many Islamic State fighters to walk free.
“Survivors have long argued that a global response to ISIS must include a global commitment to bringing them to justice. What we have seen so far is too little, and soon it may be too late,” Mrs. Clooney said.
Write to Bojan Pancevski at bojan.pancevski@wsj.com
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