French woman sentenced to life in jail for joining IS

BAGHDAD: French jihadist Djamila Boutoutaou attends her trial at the Central penal Court in Baghdad yesterday. French jihadist Boutoutaou, 29, was sentenced to life in prison for belonging to the Islamic State group, the latest in a series of court judgments against jihadists. —AFP

BAGHDAD: Iraq is using collective punishment including sexual exploitation against women and children with alleged ties to Islamic State jihadists, Amnesty International said yesterday. In a new report, the watchdog revealed widespread discrimination by security forces, camp administrators and local authorities against women and children in eight camps for people displaced by violence.

"Iraqi women and children with perceived ties to IS are being punished for crimes they did not commit," said Lynn Maalouf, Amnesty's Middle East research director. "They are trapped in camps, ostracized and denied food, water and other essentials. This humiliating collective punishment risks laying the foundation for future violence." The United Nations said in February that some 2.5 million people remained displaced after Iraqi forces backed by an international coalition waged a vast offensive to oust the extremist group from parts of northern Iraq it had seized in 2014.

Many of those who fled IS-held areas ended up in camps. Amnesty said that in each of the eight camps it visited, women were being pressured into sexual relationships in exchange for money, aid and protection. In its report, entitled "The Condemned: Women and Children Isolated, Trapped and Exploited in Iraq", the watchdog said women in the camps were also at risk of rape. "The very people who are supposed to be protecting them are turning into predators," said Maalouf. She called on the Iraqi government to show its commitment to protecting women by "holding all perpetrators to account and stopping all armed men from entering" the camps for the displaced.

Amnesty also called on Iraqi authorities to "immediately end the systematic and widespread practice of forcibly disappearing men and boys with perceived ties to IS that has left thousands of wives, mothers, daughters and sons in desperate situations". In many cases, the men's only "crimes" were escaping an IS stronghold, having similar names to jihadists on "wanted lists", or working in non-combat roles with the group, the watchdog said. Iraq declared victory over IS in December after pushing the jihadists out of their final holdouts along the border with Syria. But the group retains the capacity to strike and still clings to pockets of desert in war-torn Syria.

French woman jailed

In another development, Iraq yesterday sentenced a French woman to life in prison for belonging to the Islamic State group, raising to more than 180 the number of such convictions of foreign women since the country's defeat of IS. Djamila Boutoutaou, a 29-year-old of Algerian origin, told a Baghdad court that she left France with her husband, a rapper. She said she thought they were going on holiday but "when I arrived in Turkey I discovered that my husband was a jihadist". She said she was forced by her husband to join IS and live in the "caliphate" that the jihadists proclaimed in 2014 straddling Syria and Iraq. Boutoutaou, who appeared in court wearing a brown headscarf, said she and her two children had been forced to live in a "cave".

Her husband was killed near the former jihadist stronghold of Mosul, northern Iraq, and her son died in bombardment, Boutoutaou said, before she and the wife of a neighbor fled and surrendered to Kurdish peshmerga fighters. Two women from Russia, both holding children in their arms, were also sentenced to life in prison at the same hearing, while five from Azerbaijan were condemned to death along with a woman from Trinidad. Iraq declared victory in December against IS, which at one point controlled a third of the country. The Iraqi anti-terrorism law empowers courts to convict people who are believed to have helped IS even if they are not accused of violence.

In January, an Iraqi court condemned a German woman to death after finding her guilty of belonging to IS. A court the following month sentenced another French woman to seven months in jail for entering Iraq illegally but ordered her release on time already served. Under Iraqi anti-terrorism laws, a total of 97 foreign women have now been condemned to death since January and 185 others to life imprisonment by courts in Baghdad, a judicial source said. Most of the women were from Turkey and republics of the former Soviet Union. Iraqi authorities have not announced any of the sentences being carried out.- Agencies