Nobel Peace Prize winner says UN failing to bring IS to justice

In a courtroom in Munich, Nora sat across from the person who had bought her as a slave, abused her and murdered her five-year old daughter.

Nora and Reda were being held captive in Iraq by the jihadist group Islamic State (IS) in 2015, the year after IS began what the UN says was a genocidal campaign against the Yazidi religious minority.

They were “bought” as slaves by IS husband and wife Taha al-Jumailly and Jennifer Wenisch who had travelled to Fallujah from Germany.

In late July, five-year-old Reda got sick and wet the bed.

To punish her, Al-Jumailly took the little girl outside and chained her to a window in 50C degree heat. He and his wife left the child to die of dehydration while her mother, locked up inside, could only watch.

Wenisch became one of the first members of IS to be tried and convicted of a war crime, in 2021. A month later, Al-Jumailly was convicted of genocide.

Nora’s testimony was instrumental in securing their convictions.

“This is possible, it’s been done,” says Nobel Peace Prize-winner Nadia Murad, a Yazidi activist who is from the same village as Nora and has spent the past 10 years campaigning for this kind of justice.

“What people don't know about [IS] and like-minded groups is that they don't care about being killed. But they are so scared of facing women and girls in court,” she says.

“And they will always come back with a different name if we don't hold them accountable in front of the whole world.”

In 2014, IS took over much of northern Iraq and persecuted religious and ethnic minorities. But they saved a particular brand of cruelty for the Yazidi people whose religion they despised. They killed thousands of Yazidi men, boys over the age of 12 and older women, took thousands more young women and girls captive as sex slaves, and indoctrinated boys to fight as child soldiers.

Of tens of thousands of IS members, fewer than 20 have been convicted of war crimes - in courts in Germany, Portugal and the Netherlands. In Iraq, IS members have been prosecuted for terrorism offences but not war crimes.

The convictions in Europe were secured with the help of a seven-year investigation by the UN investigative body Unitad, which Nadia Murad campaigned to set up. It gathered millions of pieces of evidence.

But the investigation ended in September, when Iraq refused to continue its partnership with the UN. The evidence is now sitting on a server in a building in New York. Murad can’t understand why there is no political will to secure more convictions.

It’s unclear how many IS members have been prosecuted in Iraq, many are being held on anti-terrorism charges but the process is not transparent. The country’s justice minister said last year that about 20,000 people had been charged with terrorism offences were imprisoned, 8,000 of whom had been sentenced to death, it’s not clear how many were IS members.

“It's devastating to survivors,” Murad says.

Most of Murad’s family were murdered. Like Nora, she was held captive and sold from member to member, raped and gang-raped repeatedly.

No-one came to rescue her; she escaped when her captor left the door unlocked. She walked for hours before knocking on the door of a family who helped smuggle her out of IS territory.

“I felt guilt for surviving while my younger nieces and friends and neighbours were still in there,” she says. “I took my survival as a responsibility to share my story so that people could know what was really happening there, under [IS] control.”

In speaking openly, Murad rejected the shame associated with sexual violence in Iraq. Many of the women she knows tried to shield themselves from stigma by staying quiet. But Murad convinced relatives and friends to give evidence to Unitad.

A big part of her work has been to protect the rights of victims of sexual violence. She created a set of guidelines, the “Murad Code”, to help survivors to control what they want to share when they speak to investigators or journalists.

“Sexual violence and rape is something that stays long after the war is over. It lasts forever and lives in your body, in your mind and in your bones,” she says.

Without the UN’s help she’s worried about how the Iraqi government will handle victims of genocide. She’s not encouraged by the way in which exhumations of her relatives have been dealt with.

There are up to 200 mass graves of people killed by IS. Sixty-eight were exhumed with the support of the UN mission, 15 of them in Murad’s village alone.

That process is now in the hands of the Iraqi authorities, only around 150 bodies out of thousands have been identified. Six of Murad’s eight brothers were killed by IS, only two of whom have had a proper burial.

“My mom, my nieces, my other four brothers, my cousins are all in a building in Baghdad,” she says. “It's very painfully slow for many of us who have been waiting for some sort of closure.”

Recently when some victims were identified their next of kin found out on Facebook because the Iraqi authorities didn’t contact them. The former head of Unitad, Christian Ritscher, told the BBC that identifying bodies is a long and difficult process. Though Unitad achieved a lot he believes the investigation ended too soon.

On the 10th anniversary of the Yazidi genocide, Murad also has strong words for institutions like the UN that were set up to prevent these crimes.

“These international bodies are failing people over and over again. Give me one example where they have succeeded at preventing war, whether it was in Iraq or Syria, Gaza and Israel, Congo or Ukraine.”

“They were meant to protect the most vulnerable,” she says. “They have been more interested in what is best for their parties and their politics.”

She is worried that the war in Gaza and Lebanon will spread and that remnants of the Islamic State group will take advantage of chaos in the Middle East once again.

“You can't just defeat an ideology like [IS] with weapons,’ she says. “We know that a lot of them are still out there and they got away with impunity.”

“I feel like I had my day in court by not staying silent, by not taking the blame and the shame and stigma, I feel like I got some sort of justice.

“But for my sisters, my nieces, my friends and my fellow survivors who have not shared their stories publicly, their pain is just so real. And it's that trauma that I think can only go away with justice.”