ISIS member Omaima Abdi convicted of keeping Yazidi slaves

German-Tunisian woman has jail sentence extended by Hamburg court

Omaima Abdi was initially jailed for three and half years, but has had her sentence extended.

A German-Tunisian woman convicted of being an ISIS member, has had her sentence extended by a court in Hamburg after she admitted to keeping two Yazidi slaves in Syria.

Omaima Abdi, 37, who is serving a three-and-a-half-year sentence for membership in a terrorist organisation, has had a further six months added to her sentence.

Abdi had initially denied the slavery charge at her first trial last year. But at the beginning of her second trial, she admitted that the two Yazidis had cleaned her flat in Raqqa, Syria in the spring of 2016.

One of the Yazidis, a 14 year old, gave evidence at the trial. Abdi has apologised to the victims, but Judge Ulrike Taeubner told her that it was time she took responsibility for her actions.

Abdi is the widow of notorious ISIS member Denis Cuspert, a German rapper who was also known by his stage name Deso Dogg. He joined ISIS in 2014 and was killed in an air strike in Syria in early 2018.

Abdi had followed Nadir Hadra, her husband at the time and an ISIS member, to Syria in 2015 and took her three children with her. But he was killed in the city of Kobani only weeks after he arrived. Abdi then married Cuspert but returned to Germany in the autumn of 2016.

For three years, Abdi was able to live in Hamburg with her three children, and another she had with Cuspert. She found work as a translator, with the authorities unaware of her past.

But she was arrested in September 2019 after journalist Jenan Moussa discovered her ISIS background.