PARIS: A French militant went on trial on Monday in Paris on charges of genocide, the first case in France to tackle atrocities committed against the Yazidi minority during the years-long conflict waged by the Daesh militant group in the Middle East.
Sabri Essid is presumed to have been killed in 2018, but without proof of his death he is being tried in absentia in Paris on charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and complicity in these crimes, committed between 2014 and 2016.
Three women from the Yazidi community, a Kurdish-speaking minority who practice a pre-Islamic faith, are civil parties in the trial, with two expected to take the stand.
Daesh seized large swathes of Syria and neighboring Iraq in 2014, declaring a so-called caliphate.
In August 2014, they murdered thousands of Yazidi men in Iraq’s Sinjar province, and took thousands of women and girls to Syria to sell them in markets as sex slaves to be abused by jihadists from around the world. UN investigators have since qualified these actions as genocide.
