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BRUSSELS: A Brussels court on Thursday found a Belgian militant-- presumed killed in a 2016 airstrike — guilty of genocide against the Yazidi minority in Iraq and Syria.
Sammy Djedou, a former fighter with the Daesh group, was reported by the Pentagon to have been killed in Raqqa, Syria.
Belgian authorities never received formal confirmation of his death, and opted to prosecute him in absentia, in the country’s first trial related to mass crimes against the Yazidis.
Djedou, previously convicted in absentia on Belgian terrorism charges, was found guilty of “genocide” for his role from 2014 onwards in an Daesh campaign to exterminate the minority group.
He was also found guilty of “crimes against humanity” for the rape and sexual enslavement of Yazidi women.
Two of Djedou’s Yazidi victims testified about their ordeal at the trial.
Olivia Venet, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, called the case “historic” for Belgium — the country that provided the most foreign fighters to Daesh per head of population.
Other countries in Europe have already prosecuted those accused of genocide against the Yazidis.
A Swedish court in February sentenced a 52-year-old woman to 12 years in prison on genocide charges for keeping Yazidi women and children as slaves at her home in Syria.
The Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking minority who practice a pre-Islamic faith, had primarily settled in northern Iraq before suffering mass persecution by Daesh from August 2014.
Thousands fled as the militants launched brutal attacks in a campaign that UN investigators have qualified as genocide.
According to the United Nations, thousands of Yazidi women and girls were subjected to rape, abduction, and inhumane treatment including slavery.
Born in Brussels in August 1989 to a Belgian mother and Ivorian father, Djedou converted to Islam at age 15 and left for Syria in October 2012 to join Daesh, according to the investigators.
He is later believed to have become a senior figure in the group’s external operations unit, tasked with planning attacks in Europe.
In 2021, he was sentenced in Belgium to 13 years in prison for leading a terrorist group.
He was also targeted in a 2022 trial into support networks behind the November 13, 2015 attacks in Paris that claimed 130 lives. He was convicted in that case but received no prison sentence.