A Belgian extremist who was tried in absentia because he is believed to have died in Syria was found guilty in Brussels today of the "crime of genocide" against the Yazidi minority.
It is the first trial held in Belgium on crimes against Yazidis committed by the Islamic State.
A court in Brussels has found Sami Jeddu, a fighter for the extremist organization, guilty of the "crime of genocide" against the Kurdish-speaking religious minority in Iraq and Syria, as well as "crimes against humanity" for raping and forcing three Yazidi women into sexual slavery between late 2014 and late 2016.
He was already convicted of terrorism in Belgium in 2021, and is now being tried again in absentia, and is presumed to have died in a war zone.
The Pentagon announced that he died in December 2016 during an airstrike on Raqqa, Syria, but Belgian authorities never had official proof and decided to prosecute him.
Before Belgium, three other European countries - Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden - tried extremists for their participation in the crimes committed by the Islamic State against this small ethnic minority.
In Jeddah's trial, a Belgian court said his motive was a "general and systematic attack" on Yazidis by Islamic State, particularly in the strongholds of Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq.
"With extreme brutality and extreme violence" in which the accused participated, the verdict read by the president of the trial chamber states.
The Belgian anti-terrorism court's investigation relied on testimonies collected by NGOs and journalists in the war zone after the fall of the Islamic State's last stronghold in Baghouz, Syria, in 2019. Through them, three Yazidi women were identified as victims of Jeddu.
"This is a historic decision for Belgium," lawyer Olivia Venet, who defended two of the three women, told AFP. She said Belgian courts have a special responsibility because Belgium is the country that has provided the most foreign fighters to the Islamic State, proportionally to its population.
The Yazidis are a Kurdish-speaking minority who follow a pre-Islamic faith and whose members mainly inhabited northern Iraq before they began to be persecuted and attacked by Islamic State extremists since August 2014, when they fled en masse.
According to the United Nations, thousands of women and adolescent girls were subjected to rape, abduction and inhumane treatment, including slavery, while Yazidi men were killed in the hundreds.
In this case, Sami Djedou could receive life imprisonment and the court will decide on the sentence tomorrow. Djedou was born in August 1989, his mother is Belgian and his father is from the Ivory Coast, he converted to Islam at the age of 15 and went to join the Islamic State in 2012. In Syria, he became a member of the external operations cell of that extremist organization, in charge of preparing attacks in Europe, along with other foreign fighters.
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