The Yazidi who fled her Isil captor in Iraq and found him a free man in Stuttgart
Terrorist killers are hiding among the genuine refugees from the Middle East and are enjoying the same benefits of German hospitality
There was no mistaking the man standing just a few feet away. Ashwaq Ta’lo would never forget the smell of his breath, his wiry beard, that distinctive gait. She had spent three months as his slave, after all. The man was among Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) commanders who had kidnapped Ashwaq, her four sisters and five brothers back in the Yazidi homeland of Sinjar in northern Iraq in the sweltering summer of 2014.
But there he was in front of her in 2018 on a street in rainy Stuttgart, Germany – the country that had offered her refuge. A country where she had come to feel safe.
It was not an isolated incident; The Daily Telegraph has been told of at least 10 Yazidi women who have seen their tormentors in similar circumstances over the past two years. Ashwaq was just 15 years old when Isil militants laid siege to the ancient region of Sinjar, displacing hundreds of thousands of people and committing what the United Nations described as genocide against Iraq’s indigenous Yazidi minority.
She was taken to live in Isil’s so-called caliphate, where she was sold for $100 (£78) at a slave auction to the man she came to know as Abu Humam.
Abu Humam lived in a compound with 18 other leaders, who passed around the six girls they had bought like commodities to be traded.
“He, or one of the others, would rape us nearly every night and use us as human shields from the airstrikes, taking us out at 3am, sometimes with a gun to our head,” she told The Telegraph at a refugee camp in Sheikhan, Iraqi Kurdistan. “A lot of what happened is too awful to speak about.”
One day the women hatched a plan to escape. They scratched their hands until they bled and waited for infection to set in. They pleaded to see a doctor, and when he visited, he gave them sleeping pills for the pain.
The next day they laced the men’s tea with the pills and any other medicines they could find. All 18 were knocked out cold and the women sneaked out to a waiting smuggler. Months later she would claim asylum in Germany. But Abu Humam, it turned out, would have the same idea.
“When I saw him in Stuttgart, my heart stopped,” she said. “It was in that moment I remembered what he said to me before I escaped. He said if I ever left him, he would reach me wherever I was. I would never be truly free.”
That day in February he pulled up to her in his car and addressed her in broken German, saying: “I know you are Ashwaq. I know how long you have been here and what you are doing. I know everything,” he told her. “He still thought of me as his property,” she said. She pretended to be Turkish and denied knowing him, before going to the police. They opened an inquiry and released an e-fit based on her description. So far they have failed to establish his true identity.
“For sure this man was a senior commander in Isil who has information on where some of the other captured Yazidis are,” said Ashwaq, wearing black as a sign of mourning for the sisters and five brothers who are among the 3,000 still missing. “It’s important they find and question him.”
Ashwaq was invited by the German
‘He, or one of the others, would rape us nearly every night and use us as human shields from the airstrikes’
government to come to the country in 2015 through a £75 million programme designed to help the thousands of Yazidi women and child victims of Isil.
She was housed near Stuttgart in the southwestern region of Badenwürttemberg, and given trauma counselling and schooling.
Ashwaq had begun to build a life there with her mother and brother, taking language lessons and interning at a local hairdressing salon. But unable to leave Baden-württemberg – the state where she had registered – and confronted with the prospect of seeing Abu Humam again, she decided to return to live with her father in Iraq. “How could I feel safe if my rapist is living there and has the same rights as me?” she said.
Ashwaq’s story sounds like one of those extraordinary one-in-a-million chance meetings, but it is not.
At least 10 others have reported seeing their tormentor in similar circumstances in the last two years, says Dr Jan Kizilhan, a psychologist paid by Stuttgart to look after Yazidi women brought to Germany.
The federal prosecutor’s office has set up a special unit devoted entirely to these cases. One woman The
Telegraph spoke to, who did not wish to give her name, saw one of her kidnappers at the Christmas market.
“He was with a woman who must have been his wife. They looked so normal, so happy,” she said. “The blood drained from my head. The things he had done to me, the things I thought were behind me, all came back.
“He did not recognise me, and for this reason I decided not to say anything,” said the 21-year-old, who still lives in Germany and plans to continue studying sociology. “If I bring it up, I have to live through it all over again. If I don’t, I live with it inside.
“Not even in my nightmares did I imagine this could happen.”
Dr Kizilhan said he worried such an experience, particularly in a place the women had come to feel safe, could be extremely traumatic. “They could fall into a state of restlessness that could be difficult to get out of,” he said.
Germany has given refuge to some of the world’s most vulnerable people, those who have fled Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan for the safety of Europe.
But Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door policy has inadvertently offered refuge to their abusers too.
Aghiad al-kheder, co-founder of Sound and Picture, the anti-isil activists, fled his hometown of Deir Ezzor in eastern Syria after it was overrun by the jihadists. In 2015 he crossed into neighbouring Turkey, on to Greece and from there made his way to Germany. But once there he was shocked to find some familiar faces.
He said he knows dozens of Isil members are in Germany. Activists like him have flagged them up to the police, but they have been told that little can be done.
“The police can’t do anything as we don’t have pictures or video to prove they were with Isil. All the videos posted on social media were removed,” he said. “We try to get witnesses, but unfortunately it takes time and that gives them the chance to escape.”
He said many victims, particularly those who had been imprisoned or tortured by Isil back in Syria, do not report sightings as they are too afraid to talk. Others tip off the intelligence service’s special hotline for refugees.
Mr Kheder, 28, said most of the Isil members do not even bother hiding their identities, opting to live in cities where there is less risk of bumping into people who might know them.
“Many we know are here from their Facebook pages. They would change their profile and share a picture of their new life, then we know they are in Europe. We can’t do anything, so we just watch them,” he said.
“I think a new Isil will emerge in the next four years and many of them will be here. Maybe democracy is not always good.”
Polla Garmiany, a Kurdish political adviser based in the EU who works with the lobby group Kurdish Community in Germany (KGD), said many refugees have been left feeling like they have little recourse.
“Many have the feeling that the police are letting the new arrivals settle their disputes on their own,” Mr Garmiany said, suggesting authorities had little appetite for dredging up old cases.
“To be honest, I think Ashwaq’s case is only getting attention due to the huge outcry,” he said. “I mean the case is almost six months old and nothing has really been done up to now. But after the media covered it they took action.”
Prosecutors are in a bind. Ignore the problem and it could come back to bite them. Try to bring a case to court and it could fail for lack of evidence. And then a suspected Isil member is back on the streets.
German law prohibits deporting people to countries where they could face the death penalty, such as Iraq, so where there is insufficient evidence to charge a person they must be released.
“We assume that some of these perpetrators have blood on their hands, but often we can’t prove it,” said Peter Frank, one of Germany’s top prosecutors. “Our problem is: what proof can we get from a war zone where all state structures have collapsed? Cooperation in terms of legal help doesn’t work, either in Syria or Iraq.”
Guido Steinberg, a leading expert on Islamic extremism at the Berlinbased Institute for International and Security Affairs, said there were about a dozen suspected Isil operatives and other jihadists being tried across the country; some of the small number that authorities had managed to identify and bring to justice.
“Germany’s open-door policy was a catastrophe, and I say this as someone incredibly sympathetic to the refugee cause,” he said.
“We should have accepted more people from Syria in 2012 and 2013, then when the numbers rose in 2015 the government should have closed the borders like the Austrians did and processed people in an orderly way.”
Mr Steinberg, who testifies on the political and security situation in Syria and Iraq in the cases that do reach court, said police may never find the suspect in Ashwaq’s case because it is likely he used false documents to enter the country, as thousands of others were thought to have done.
“Germany still doesn’t know who some of these people that came in are; they are unaccounted for,” he said.
While Ashwaq says she does not bear any anger toward Germany for what has happened, she regrets that the men, her tormentors, were not properly vetted.
“I’m speaking out now because there are hundreds of Yazidi girls in Stuttgart who are living among Isil men, but no one hears the voice of those girls or does anything for them,” she said.
But Germany is attempting something rather ambitious to clear Isil suspects off its streets.
For several years, the country’s attorney general has been investigating the genocide and the enslavement of the Yazidis. More than 100 women and girls have been interviewed by the federal criminal police office.
The result has been a raft of detailed testimonies of genocide as well as war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Most European countries have legislation that allows them to prosecute international crimes regardless of where in the world they happen. Germany is one of only a few countries, along with Sweden, that appears to be prepared to prosecute not only terrorism offences, but genocide and war crimes.
“Right now Germany has what you would call an ongoing ‘structural investigation’,” said Pishko Shamsi, who helped produce a Yazidi genocide report for the UN in Geneva. “They have been interviewing all witnesses and Yazidi victims in Germany to build a body of testimonies and evidence.
“They just need a suspect,” Mr Shamsi said. “At the time when I was working on these files last year, they didn’t have a suspect.
“There is a historical precedent for this, if you look at Yugoslavia and Rwanda, for example, where refugees from these countries were tried in European national courts for genocide.”
Judicial sources in Germany said there could be a mass “Nurembergstyle” trial of all suspects involved in crimes against Yazidis as early as next year, if they can build a solid case.
“It is not just a case of punishing mass murder,” said Dr Kizilhan, the psychologist working with Yazidi refugees in Germany. “It is about the struggle to not forget, to document for the following generation and give dignity back to the survivors.”
‘There are hundreds of Yazidi girls in Stuttgart living among Isil men, but no one hears their voice or does anything’
‘We try to get witnesses, but it takes time and that gives them the chance to escape’