Syrian charged in Germany with is war crimes
German prosecutors on Wednesday said that they were charging a Syrian man with war crimes committed as an extremist militant for ISIS.
In the wake of President Bashar al-Assad’s overthrow, German authorities have vowed to keep bringing suspects to justice for crimes committed during the Syrian civil war.
Prosecutors said that the suspect, partially named as Osama A., was being charged with membership of a terrorist organization abroad and as an accomplice to genocide, as well as other war crimes.
They said he had joined the extremist group by mid-2014 and took on a senior position in ISIS’s local security forces in Syria’s Deir Ezzor region bordering Iraq.
He “played a central role” in ISIS’s expropriation of several buildings, two of which were then used for the sexual exploitation of female captives from the Yazidi minority.
The Kurdish-speaking Yazidis were a particular target for ISIS, who considered their non-Muslim faith heretical. The extremists massacred thousands of men and abducted thousands of women and girls as sex slaves.
German prosecutors say other properties that Osama A. helped to seize were used as living quarters for ISIS fighters, as offices or for storage.
He is also accused of recruiting his 13-year-old nephew to ISIS, who went on to fight for the group in the northern city of Aleppo.
Germany has previously used the principle of universal jurisdiction, which allows the prosecution of certain grave crimes regardless of where they took place, to try Syrians over atrocities committed during the civil war.
In the wake of al-Assad’s ouster, Berlin vowed that any of the former president’s “henchmen” fleeing to Germany would be brought to justice.
ISIS seized large swathes of Syrian and Iraqi territory in the early years of the civil war, declaring a cross-border “caliphate” in 2014.
US-backed Syrian Kurdish forces defeated that proto-state in 2019, but the extremists have maintained a presence in Syria’s vast desert.
Last week, Syrian authorities said they had foiled an attempt by ISIS extremists to blow up a revered Shia shrine in a Damascus suburb.
