A court in Munich has sentenced an Iraqi man to life imprisonment and his former wife to nine and a half years in jail for enslaving, abusing and raping two Yazidi girls in Iraq while both were members of the Islamic State (IS) militant group. The Munich Higher Regional Court found the man, identified as Twana H.S. under German privacy rules, guilty of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and severe sexual abuse of children. His former wife, Asia R.A., received a reduced juvenile sentence because she was under 21 at the time of the offences.

Prosecutors established that in autumn 2015, Twana H.S. purchased a five-year-old Yazidi girl at a slave market in Mosul, the northern Iraqi city that served as a major IS stronghold, at his wife's request. A twelve-year-old girl was bought in early October 2017. Both children were repeatedly raped by Twana H.S., forced to perform household labour and childcare, beaten — sometimes with solid objects — and forbidden from practising their religion. Asia R.A. was found to have assisted in the abuse, including scalding the younger girl's hand with hot water. The second girl remains missing.

Twana H.S. was born in Iraq in 1981 and arrived in Germany in the early 2000s as an asylum seeker, eventually working as a hairdresser in Munich. Though his asylum claim was rejected, he was permitted to remain as the father of a German child. After becoming radicalised at a Munich mosque, he returned to Iraq in 2015, where he joined IS and married Asia R.A. under Islamic law. The couple were arrested in the German state of Bavaria in 2024. During the trial, the now 20-year-old survivor who had been bought at age twelve read a statement in court, saying: