A German woman who joined the Islamic State in Syria, enslaved a 5-year-old Yazidi slave girl, and left her chained up to die in the scorching sun has had her sentence increased to 14 years’ imprisonment.
Jennifer Wenisch, an Islam convert from Lohne in Lower Saxony, was initially jailed for 10 years in October 2021 for her role in the girl’s death. This, however, was increased at a hearing on Tuesday at the Higher Regional Court in Munich.
The German national was convicted of enslavement resulting in death and of being a member of a terrorist organization.
Having fled Germany for Syria to join the Islamic death cult back in 2015, Wenisch married Taha Al-J., an Iraqi citizen, and was recruited to join the organization’s morality police where she was responsible for enforcing the draconian Islamic laws on dress code and public behavior.
During her time in Syria, 32-year-old Wenisch and her ISIS fighter husband purchased a Yazidi woman and her 5-year-old daughter to work for them as household slaves.
Yazidis are a Kurdish-speaking religious group who suffered genocide at the hands of the Islamic State throughout the 2010s, resulting in the murder of thousands of Yazidi men and the sexual enslavement of Yazidi women.
At her initial trial, the court found that the Yazidi woman and her daughter were subjected to horrific abuse by their captors; the young child was eventually bound in the midday sun and left to die of thirst as punishment for wetting the bed in August 2015.
The mother survived the ordeal and testified at trial, telling the court how Wenisch had later put a gun to her head and threatened to kill her if she continued to cry over her daughter’s death.
Wenisch was ultimately arrested the following year while attempting to renew her travel documents at the German Embassy in the Turkish capital of Ankara; she was subsequently extradited to Germany to face trial. Her husband was sentenced to life imprisonment by a German court in November 2021.
After her initial sentencing, Wenisch sought to appeal her conviction, a matter that was thrown out by Germany’s Federal Court of Justice, while the prosecution also appealed what it considered to be the ISIS bride’s lenient sentence.
On Tuesday, the Munich court held that Wenisch had “acted out of contempt for fellow human beings,” was equally responsible for the death of her 5-year-old victim, and sentenced her to 14 years’ imprisonment.