Suspended sentence for German woman who joined ISIS aged 15

Leonora Messing, a 19-year-old German national who fled fighting between Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and ISIS in the frontline Syrian village of Baghuz, awaits to be screened and registered by the SDF in the countryside of the eastern Syrian Deir

A German woman who joined ISIS terrorist group in Syria as a 15-year-old was handed a two-year suspended prison sentence on Wednesday but cleared of aiding and abetting crimes against humanity.

Judges found Leonora Messing, now 22, guilty of membership of a terrorist organization, a spokesman for the higher regional court in Naumburg said in a statement.

Prosecutors had accused Messing and her husband of buying and enslaving a Yazidi woman in Syria in 2015.

But the judges discovered this might not be confirmed throughout her trial within the jap metropolis of Halle, held behind closed doorways as a result of Messing was a minor on the time of the alleged occasions.

The high-profile case prompted some soul-searching when it got here to gentle over how a teenage woman from a small German city turned radicalized and joined ISIS.

Messing, a former highschool band majorette, ran away from residence sure for the ISIS-controlled a part of Syria in March 2015.

After reaching al-Rigga., then the de facto “capital” of ISIS in Syria, she turned the third spouse of a German nationwide and recognized extremist.

Messing’s father, a baker from the German village of Breitenbach, solely discovered his daughter had transformed to a radical model of Islam by opening her deserted pc and studying her journal after her disappearance.

Six days after she vanished, her father acquired a message informing him his daughter “chose Allah and Islam” and that she had “arrived in the caliphate.”

Messing, who had given beginning to 2 small ladies, wound up detained in a Kurdish-controlled camp in northern Syria.

Her husband, Martin Lemke, was captured in 2019 by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the Kurdish administration’s de-facto military, two of his wives instructed AFP on the time.

In December 2020, Messing was repatriated in one among 4 operations bringing a complete of 54 folks, most of them kids, again to Germany.

Messing was arrested upon her arrival at Frankfurt airport however later launched.

She now lives near the place she grew up in Germany together with her two kids, in keeping with native media.

A German court docket in November issued the primary ruling worldwide to acknowledge crimes in opposition to the Yazidi neighborhood as genocide, in a verdict hailed by activists as a (*15*) win for the minority.

The Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking group hailing from northern Iraq, have for years been persecuted by ISIS militants who have killed tons of of males, raped girls and forcibly recruited kids as fighters.



PUKmedia/AFP