German police arrest suspected ISIS members for enslaving Yazidi girls

Shafaq News/ German police arrested two suspected ISIS members) on Wednesday for allegedly enslaving and abusing two young Yazidi girls in Iraq and Syria between 2015 and 2017.

The married couple was apprehended in Regensburg and the Roth district in southern Bavaria.

According to prosecutors, the young girls suffered physical abuse, repeated rape, and were prohibited from practicing their religion.

The couple is accused of enslaving a five-year-old Yazidi girl from 2015 and a 12-year-old starting in October 2017.

Prosecutors stated that the suspects "exploited the girls economically by forcing them into household chores and childcare." Additionally, they" imposed Islamic practices on the girls, forbidding them from following their own religious beliefs."

The suspects handed over the girls to other IS members before leaving Syria in November 2017, prosecutors revealed.

"All of this served the organization's objective to destroy the Yazidi religion," the prosecutors' statement read.

The arrest comes after the German parliament's resolution last year, recognizing ISIS's crimes against Iraq's Yazidi community as genocide.

The Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking minority, were persecuted by ISIS after the group overran large swathes of territory in Syria and Iraq beginning in 2014.

The ethno-religious Yazidi community's population is around 500,000 in Iraq.