SW News: The European Union's judicial cooperation agency announced on Monday that the Netherlands and Belgium have joined a global inquiry into atrocities committed against the Yazidi minority in Syria and Iraq.

France, Sweden, and Hague-based Eurojust formed the joint investigation team in October 2021 to find and prosecute foreign radicals who targeted members of the minority community during the armed conflict in Syria and Iraq.

The collaboration has already paid off in France, as evidenced by the identification of a Yazidi victim of a French jihadist couple. As a result, allegations of crimes against humanity and genocide were added to an already active case.

The joint investigation team is part of a larger international effort to bring those responsible for crimes against the Yazidi minority, which the Islamic State or IS militant group considers heretics, to account.

In 2021, a UN investigation concluded that the atrocities committed by Islamic State militants against Yazidis constituted genocide. In August 2014, IS launched an attack on the Yazidi community's center at the foot of Sinjar Mountain. ISIS killed hundreds of Yazidis during the week-long offensive and kidnapped 6,417 people. More than half of them were women and girls. The majority of the adult male prisoners were killed in the end. Girls and women were viewed as mere commodities to be used for rape and enslavement.

In Europe, prosecutions of terrorists who have returned from abroad for crimes against Yazidis are already in progress. Meanwhile, a German court sentenced a woman to more than nine years in prison for enslaving a Yazidi woman and for participating in war crimes and genocide as an ISIS member.

The 37-year-old German defendant, who went by the name Nadine K, was also found guilty of participating in a foreign terrorist organization and crimes against humanity. The defendant traveled to Syria with her husband to enlist in IS in December 2014. The pair relocated to Iraq's Mosul in 2015 before returning to Syria. The duo kept a Yazidi woman as a slave who was beaten and regularly raped by Nadine’s husband.

IS killed around 1,200 Yazidis, sold 7,000 Yazidi women and girls into slavery, and uprooted the majority of the 550,000-strong community from their homes in northern Iraq after taking large portions of Iraq and Syria in 2014.

In a decision praised by advocates as a "historic" victory for the minority, a German court defined crimes against the Yazidi community as genocide in November 2021, becoming the first court in the world to do so. Germany today has about 150,000 Yazidis living there.