German prosecutor charges Syrian with war crimes against Yazidis

BERLIN (Reuters) - A high-ranking member of the Islamic State militant group in Syria has been charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity in Germany, partly for alleged involvement in the genocide against the Yazidi community, prosecutors said.

The suspect, a Syrian national identified as Ossama A. in line with German privacy law, joined Islamic State (IS) in the summer of 2014 in the Deir ez-Zor region of eastern Syria, the German prosecutor-general's office said in a statement.

It said he is suspected of having led a local unit that forcibly seized 13 properties, mainly privately owned, which were used to house fighters, as office space or for storage.

Two of the buildings were used by IS to imprison captured Yazidi women so that fighters could sexually abuse and exploit them, according to Wednesday's statement, which listed aiding and abetting genocide among the charges against Ossama A.

"This was an integral part of the organisation's goal of destroying the Yazidi religious community," it said.

The suspect was arrested in Germany in April 2024 and is being held in pre-trial custody.

Germany has emerged as a key prosecutor of Syrian war crimes outside of Syria under the principle of universal jurisdiction.

In early 2022, a former Syrian intelligence officer who worked in a Damascus prison was jailed for life in a landmark trial where he was convicted of murder, rape and sexual assault.

A senior German foreign ministry official said on Wednesday Berlin supports a U.N. body set up to assist investigations into serious crimes committed in Syria, particularly now that the long-reigning president Bashar al-Assad has been ousted.

"The IIIM is collecting evidence so that those responsible for these terrible crimes committed against countless Syrians can be held to account," minister of state Tobias Lindner said in a statement.

"What is clear is that the process of investigating and prosecuting these horrible crimes must be pursued under (the new) Syrian leadership," he added.

Rebels swept Assad from power late last year, flinging open prisons and government offices and raising fresh hopes for accountability for crimes committed during Syria's more than 13-year civil war.

IS jihadists controlled swathes of Iraq and Syria from 2014-17 before being routed by Western-led coalition forces and defeated in their last bastions in Syria in 2019.

Islamic State viewed the Yazidis, an ancient religious minority, as devil worshippers and killed more than 3,000 of them, as well as enslaving 7,000 Yazidi women and girls and displacing most of the 550,000-strong community from its ancestral home in northern Iraq.

The United Nations has said IS attacks on the Yazidis amounted to a genocidal campaign against them.

(Writing by Rachel More; editing by Mark Heinrich)