No justice for Kurds if the rest of the world looks the other way
‘I ordered him three times to look at me but he refused. He just stared at the ground for the whole trial’
The Islamic State defendant clearly expected to face judgment from a man. So when the petite, highheeled and non-veiled blonde took her place in the courtroom in north-eastern Syria, he quickly averted his eyes.
“It’s considered haram [forbidden] in Isis’s version of Islam to look a strange women in the eye,” Judge Amina told The Daily Telegraph from her office, laughing as she recalled the suspect’s discomfort. “Perhaps it has been years since he saw a woman like me. I ordered him three times to look at me but he refused. He just stared at the ground for the whole trial.”
Amina – who asked to be identified only by a first name for her security – is one of three judges sitting at a special court near Qamishli, a city in the autonomous Kurdish region of Syria.
The Kurds, which established a breakaway administration in 2013, have built a justice system from scratch based on Rojava’s secular, socialist-influenced constitution, without recognition from the Syrian government or the outside world.
So far they have tried only locals – 6,000 in total – but yesterday it was announced they would begin hearing the cases of foreign suspects too.
The Kurds have for years borne the responsibility for terrorists who came from all over the world to fight with Isil. Their governments have refused responsibility for them, so they languish in prisons and camps across the north-east. Desperate to gain legitimacy for their fledgling state, the Kurds have abolished the death penalty – still legal under Syrian state law – and offered reduced sentences to Isil members who hand themselves in.
The allegations against some of the suspects are serious – crimes against humanity, genocide, rape and enslavement of the minority Yazidi people, mass murder and kidnapping.
The harshest sentence Amina can pass is life, which normally means 20 years and is reserved for what she calls the “top-tier jihadists” – the emirs, leaders and frontline fighters.
In the “second-tier” category, which includes those who worked in Isil’s sharia or military administration, she usually passes a sentence of one or two years. The third tier includes those she considers to have been “forced” to work for Isil for money, who are not ideologically driven and who served in menial roles. More often than not she lets them go free.
She can see as many as five suspects a day, she says. Few appear to have any legal representation.
Amina, who is 47 but looks half her age, wonders whether prison is the answer for the most serious offenders.
“These people are a danger to the whole world and I don’t think the answer is prison,” she told The Telegraph during a visit last year to Rojava.
“Prison will not change people who think it is OK to rape and enslave a Yazidi woman and to kill her if she does not obey.”
The detention centres of north-east Syria are overflowing. Journalists who
‘They’re all great liars too. I watch them on TV telling the world they were all cooks and mechanics. No one was actually fighting, it seems’
have been given access to them report seeing prisoners sleeping shoulder-toshoulder on the ground, sometimes 50 to a cell.
“They’re all great liars too. I watch them speaking on TV telling the world they were all cooks and mechanics,” Amina said. “Every one of them stands in my courtroom and tries to tell me they are a cook or a mechanic. No one was actually fighting, it seems,” she says, incredulous, as she pushes back the sunglasses on her head.
But she claims there is a wealth of evidence – mostly from civilian witnesses or Isil’s own propaganda – against many of the defendants.
She sends me a video via Whatsapp that shows four men executing a young man at point-blank range, smiling at the camera as they do it. Isil’s black flag flies in the corner of the screen.
“One of those men was a defendant in my courtroom,” she says. “He denied his crimes to my face but when I presented him with Isis’s slick, high-resolution video, he went silent.”
She complains that the burden should not be on Kurds to deal with the detritus of the Islamic State.
“We fought Isil and won, but lost everything. All we did was for nothing, after all the Kurds are still not recognised by the international community and we still have no protection,” Amina said.
“Why don’t they try their own nationals, or come here and judge them themselves?” she asks.