Foreign IS fighters face justice in Baghdad criminal court
The Iraqi Central Criminal Court in Baghdad began trying foreign fighters who joined the Islamic State and were captured in the war to liberate Iraqi territory from IS.
Samira, a fair-skinned, green-eyed woman from Azerbaijan, met her Turkish husband on social media. “Our first rendezvous was in Turkey,” she told Judge Suheil Abdallah at her first hearing at the Central Criminal Court in Baghdad. “We got married, and we decided to go to live in Syria. It was 2015. We lived almost one year in Syria and one year in Iraq, where we were then divorced.” Dressed in the women’s pink uniform of the Iraqi Correctional Center, which is the prison for women north of Baghdad, she was with her 2-year-old daughter, Safiya. Samira said she was not aware of committing a crime. “Where’s your husband now?” the judge asked. “I don’t know. I lost news of him during the battle of Mosul in 2017,” she replied.
According to the 2005 Iraqi Counterterrorism Law, prisoners could be given a sentence of 15 years to life or the death penalty. Women of foreign nationality who lived in Iraq under the Islamic State’s (IS) rule risk spending 20 years in prison, which is the term of life imprisonment in Iraq.
There are no witnesses or evidence in Samira’s trial that could change her fate. Many Russian women are waiting their turn to see the judge, however, the Russian translator is not available every day, and so they wait. “The translators, whether French or Russian or Turkish, are not always there, and women and children wait in vain,” Judge Abdallah told Al-Monitor.
Up to 1,000 women are believed to be held in Baghdad, together with 820 infants. The women are accused of being IS affiliates. At the same time, in the same court, male cells are always full, as the men wait for their turn as well to see the judges. Seventy percent of the men are accused of being IS members and have already passed investigation hearings in other smaller courts. The other 30% are ordinary criminals: A man who stole a car waits next to one who could have committed war crimes.
