A federal prosecutor in Germany on Monday charged an Iraqi couple with enslavement, torture, and war crimes for their alleged treatment of two young Yazidi girls.

The suspects, identified as Twana H.S. and Asia R.A., were arrested in Bavaria in April and are accused of keeping the girls as slaves while they were members of the Islamic State (IS) group in Iraq and Syria between 2015 and 2017.

According to prosecutors, the couple kept a five-year-old Yazidi girl as a slave starting in late 2015, and a 12-year-old girl from October 2017. The man allegedly raped both girls repeatedly, while the woman prepared the room and applied makeup to one of the victims.

The couple is also accused of exerting “harsh physical violence” on the girls, including hitting one of them with a broomstick and scalding the other’s hand with hot water. Both children were forced to stand on one leg for half an hour as punishment and were coerced into performing household work and childcare. Prosecutors allege that the couple’s actions were part of a larger effort by IS to destroy the Yazidi religion. Before leaving Syria in November 2017, the suspects handed the girls over to other IS members.

The charges against Twana H.S. and Asia R.A. are a grim reminder of the atrocities committed by IS against minority groups, including the Yazidi people. The case highlights the ongoing efforts of German authorities to bring perpetrators of war crimes to justice. Germany previously condemned an Iraqi Islamic State figure for genocide against the Yazidi minority, sentencing him to life imprisonment for killing a five-year-old girl in 2021, and a further case in the Higher Regional Court of Koblenz in June 2023. Earlier this month The Hague District Court sentenced Dutch woman Hasna A to 10 years for crimes including the enslavement of a Yazidi woman, marking a significant step in the pursuit of justice for Yazidi genocide survivors. In 2023 the German parliament decided to officially recognise the Yazidi genocide at the hands of ISIS in 2014.