Captor-captive encounter raises alarm in Germany

An encounter in Germany between an Iraqi woman and her ISIS captor has sounded the alarm that the number of Jihadists in this European country is increasing. The tragedy of Ashwaq, a Yazidi woman, unfolded four years ago when ISIS fighters attacked a town in northern Iraq. The German Deutsche Welle reported that the militant group also abducted scores of Yazidi women and children. According to a report compiled by the UN, ISIS committed a genocide of Yazidis in the area.

Aswhaq, together with her family, was sold into slavery. Her captor, named Abu-Hammam, moved her to Syria where she was kept as a slave for weeks. Her abductor compelled her to convert to Islam and learn Arabic to recite the Qur’an.

According to The Times, Ashwaq managed to escape to Germany. Her nightmarish experience in Syria renewed when she encountered her tormentor on the streets of Schwäbisch Gmünd, a town in Baden-Württemberg.

Ashwaq arrived in the southwestern state with her family in 2015 through a program aimed at assisting Yazidi women who had been subjected to violence by ISIS.

“I was sold to an ISIS fighter nicknamed Abu-Hammam for US$100,” Ashwaq said. For more than 10 months, she was sexually assaulted and physically tortured.

Recalling her bizarre encounter in Germany, she said that she was shocked when Abu-Hammam rudely reminded her of himself and the time they had spent together. “He introduced himself, saying that I lived with him for some time in Mosul,” the woman said. She appealed for help from the Germany security authorities. But she decided to return to Kurdistan after her appeal was overlooked. 

To her shock, the German police told the Yazidi woman that her captor was, like her, an asylum seeker in Germany and that they could not handle the issue legally.

The captor-captive encounter has reinforced concerns that ISIS-linked asylum seekers would be planning terrorist attacks in Germany.   

Confessing to the legal shortcomings in the asylum-seeking programme, the German security authorities said that about 1700 Jihadists had arrived in German territories last year. The German security officials said that the number of these fighters increased to 1900 in May this year. The German government  is deeply concerned that about 2220 German people had sworn loyalty to ISIS.  

Sources close to the German government reaffirmed that about 1000 German Jihadists had travelled to Syria and Iraq to join ISIS there. The sources warned that about one third of these German Jihadists, of which 16% are women, had returned to the mother land.

A senior security official in Germany said that the swelling number of ISIS-linked fighters in the Germany had substantiated the threat posed by the terrorist group. Hans-Georg Maasen, the President of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Germany’s domestic security agency) asserted that security authorities were paying increasing attention to the alarming phenomenon.