ISLAMIC STATE ON TRIAL
‘I SHOT THEM THERE IN THE SCHOOL HALL. I THINK I KILLED 10 OR 12 OF THEM, INCLUDING SOME CHILDREN’
‘I kept the four girls in an abandoned house. Each night I would have sex with a different one,” the dishevelledlooking man told the judge matter of factly. “Sometimes they seemed scared, but they never said no. They were all virgins when I got them and more beautiful than you can imagine.”
The suspected Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) fighter standing before the Nineveh investigations court, 32 kilometres southeast of Mosul, seemed unrepentant as he confessed to his crimes: four counts of kidnap and rape of women belonging to the minority Yazidi sect and 10 counts of the murder of its men.
The evidence against Mohammed Ahmed filled several folders, which were stacked on top of a pile of a dozen or so others on Judge Arif ’s desk.
The 40-year-old recounted the story of how he and other ISIL fighters rounded up scores of Yazidi men and boys in a primary school in the Sinjar region of northern Iraq, after capturing their homeland in the summer of 2014.
“I shot them there in the school hall,” he told the court. “I think I killed 10 or 12 of them, including some children.”
He said his commander, an ISIL emir, then ordered him to take the prettiest girls in the town back to Mosul. From there, they were sold into slavery and passed around senior members.
Ahmed said he was presented with four, the eldest of whom was 30 and the youngest 22. “They were part of my salary, I received 60,000 dinars (US$64) a month and the women as a bonus,” he said.
“What did you do when you were done with them?” the judge asked.
“I gave them to another fighter in return for $200 each,” he replied. “I was brainwashed. I thought the Yazidis were infidels, like Jews. That they were lower than Muslims and that what we were doing to them was OK. The leaders injected me with drugs, which made me act that way. I’m as sorry as there are numbers of hairs on my head.”
But Arif was no longer interested. After 10 minutes listening to Ahmed’s testimony, he shut his file.
“He says he’s sorry and regrets what he did, but apparently not enough to hand himself in. We had to find and arrest him,” he told the court, located inside a commandeered house in the once ISIL-held and now largely destroyed Christian town of Qaraqosh.
“We have a lot of evidence against him and several witnesses; it won’t be hard to convict.”
Arif will now pass Ahmed’s case on to a more-senior judge in an adjacent court for sentencing, where he could face life in prison or even beheading.
“We found a lot of ISIL paperwork in Mosul, which makes our job a lot easier,” the judge told The Daily Telegraph. “They weren’t a ragtag militia, they were incredibly organized, like an army, and documented everything.”
He flicked through a bundle of Excel spreadsheets. One had several columns under the title The Uthman Brigade listing each fighter’s name, age, date of birth, address, nom de guerre, role and salary.
Attendance records and medical reports of the 170-strong battalion gave a detailed picture of the fighters’ daily lives.
The battle for Mosul, ISIL’s largest and most important territory in Iraq, may be over but bringing each and every one of the jihadist group’s surviving members to justice is only just beginning.
There are 12 judges sitting in Nineveh court — the only one in northern Iraq equipped to try terrorism cases. Between them they can hear 40 to 50 cases a day.
During The Daily Telegraph’s visit, suspects were crammed into every available space. Most of them were blindfolded with their hands behind their backs, kneeling on the floor facing the wall.
Another of the judges, Mr. Hashim, said 5,000 ISIL suspects were being held in makeshift prisons in empty houses around Mosul and that last week he signed arrest warrants for 6,500 more.
He admitted the process was imperfect. Some end up being a case of mistaken identity, others are falsely accused by neighbours and former friends with grudges.
But the judges said the biggest problem they faced was government funding.
“Everything in this courtroom I bought myself with my own money, this desk, this fridge, the air conditioning, nothing comes from Baghdad,” said Hashim. “If we don’t pay for it, no one else will.”
But detainees are considered lucky if they even make it to court. Hashim said two to three were dying every day as a result of poor prison conditions. There have also been reports of soldiers executing prisoners and dumping their corpses in the Tigris river, which runs through the middle of Mosul. For weeks, bodies have been washing up along its banks.