A French jihadist tried in absentia over Islamic State group crimes against the Yazidi minority in the Middle East should be jailed for life, Paris prosecutors said on Friday.
The trial of Sabri Essid, a Frenchman born in 1984 and who joined IS in Syria in 2014, is the first of its kind in France.
Essid was "a key link in the criminal chain" that sought to annihilate the Kurdish-speaking Yazidi minority, Advocate General Sophie Havard told the Assize Court in Paris.
The Frenchman is presumed to have been killed in 2018.
But without proof of his death, he is being tried in absentia on charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and complicity in these crimes committed between 2014 and 2016.
He is accused of buying several Yazidi women at markets and then repeatedly raping them, as well as depriving them of water and food.
IS regarded the Yazidis, who follow a non-Muslim monotheistic faith, as heretics.
The jihadist group seized large swathes of Syria and neighbouring Iraq in 2014, declaring a so-called caliphate there.
In August of that year, they murdered thousands of Yazidi men in Iraq's Sinjar province and took into Syria thousands of women and girls to sell them in markets as sex slaves to be abused by jihadists from around the world.
United Nations investigators have qualified these actions as genocide.
