German prosecutors said on Wednesday, the woman has been charged with membership in a terror group and being an accessory to a crime against humanity.


Her full identity is protected. The indictment of Leonora M. is the latest in a string of cases in Germany involving women who went to the area held by IS and were involved in holding women captured by the extremist group as slaves.

A German woman who traveled to Syria to join the Islamic State group and whose husband bought a Yazidi woman as a slave.

Federal prosecutors said the suspect went to Syria and joined IS in 2015 and became the “third wife” of a member of the group. She is accused of enabling her husband’s activities for IS by running their household in Raqqa and writing his application for a job in the group’s intelligence service.

The suspect herself allegedly worked at an IS-controlled hospital and snooped on wives of IS fighters for the group’s intelligence service.

Prosecutors said her husband bought a 33-year-old Yazidi woman as a slave in 2015 with the aim of selling her with her two small children. Leonora M., they said, cared for the woman so that she could be sold on at a profit — which she subsequently was.

The suspect surrendered to Kurdish fighters in January 2019 as IS lost the areas it held in Syria. She was arrested after her return to Germany.