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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.
TOPSHOT - A picture taken on April 29, 2018 in the Iraqi capital Baghdad's Central Criminal Court shows Russian women who have been sentenced to life in prison on grounds of joining the Islamic State (IS) group standing with children in a hallway. - Iraq sentenced 19 Russian women to life in prison for joining IS group on April 29, according to an AFP journalist and a judicial source. 
The president of Baghdad's Central Criminal Court, which deals with terrorism cases, said the women were found guilty of "j
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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.

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