Yazidis

Late in the trial, Shakir's own lawyers made their move.

They pointed at Sharban's Yazidi background.

Yazidis are a religious and ethnic minority from northern Iraq, and her family belonged to that community.

Shakir's defense used this connection to suggest Sharaban believed in black magic, and that Khadija had been a human sacrifice to help Sharaban win back the husband who'd left her.

It was a theory aimed squarely at their own client's co-defendant.

The judge in charge, Conrad Kliegel, rejected the idea, saying plainly that magic and Yazidi religion itself had nothing to do with what happened.

Shakir, for his part, never spoke once during the whole trial.

There was no testimony, no defense, no explanation for why he agreed to kill a stranger for a woman he barely knew.

Among the many revolting crimes of the failed Islamist movement ISIS was the enslavement and mistreatment of women and girls.

They are Yazidis, a long-persecuted ethnic minority.

Now a Yazidi woman says she was enslaved and raped as a nine-year-old girl in the house of an Australian woman, Hoden Abbey.

Abbey is still stranded in the Middle East and wants to come home.

Several women were arrested upon their return in previous groups.

We'll have a detailed look at the case of Hoden Abbey, who is accused of holding a nine-year-old Yazidi girl as a slave while in Syria, in the front tomorrow.

You can find that episode right here, first thing Wednesday morning.

In the meantime, check out all our journalism anytime at theaustralian.com.au.

Egypt's President al-Sisi maintained that it would be a defensive deployment and that Egyptian forces will not take part in offensive actions against the Houthi rebels.

Approximately 2,000 members of the al-Yazidi Shingal resistance units are scheduled to formally join Iraq's security forces as part of an agreement to bring Yazidi's heartland of the Shingal district under Iraq's command structure.

A further 3,000 to 4,000 will be integrated at a later date.

The Iraqi government is striving to bring militias into the fold of the Iraqi Defense and Security Forces.

Iraq.

The Iraqi government said yesterday that the Sinjar Resistance Units, a Yazidi militia with ties to the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, has agreed to be dissolved and that its fighters will join the country's official security forces.

Sudan.

Amidst the country's ongoing civil war, reports cite medical workers as saying at least 21 people were killed and more than 40 others were wounded last night in a drone strike on a market in Nyala, the Sudanese city that serves as the de facto capital of the paramilitary rapid support forces.

genocide? On the specific issue of genocide, the British government has always taken the position on any conflict that it's in the first instance for the courts In this case, the ICJ, which is the International Court of Justice, which is looking at this issue to make this judgment.

And that has been a consistent approach when it came to genocides in Rwanda against the Yazidis, all of the history since 1948 and the Genocide Convention.

And I think it is right.

people outside people not in government you know they will take their own views but for the for the British government it's right that we take a view in a consistent way on the basis of court judgments now one of the things I said in my statement was we think it is important the court looks at this issue given the gravity of what has happened So it's right the court is looking at this issue.