His Islamist career began at the age of eleven

The trial against a suspected IS returnee who is said to have been taken to Syria by his mother when he was eleven began at the Hamburg Higher Regional Court on Monday. The 21-year-old German Cebrail Ö. is said to have been brought up there in the sense of the jihadist militia Islamic State (IS), as the federal prosecutor announced when the indictment was filed. He is said to have taken part in battles and campaigned for the IS ideology in a Kurdish camp.

O. According to the indictment, he received military training as a youth and was integrated into an IS combat unit, for which he is said to have fought several times between the beginning of 2016 and the end of 2017. He was wounded several times. In 2017 he was arrested by Kurdish forces and taken to a camp. From October 2019 to the end of 2021, he was housed in Syria in a youth de-radicalization facility.

There, too, he is said to have continued to appear as an IS member and to have led a group of young people to enforce the militia's ideas. At his behest, 20 group members allegedly beat up an infidel youth. The defendant is said to have hit and kicked another youth himself and threatened another youth with death if he reported him to the camp administration.

2021 should Ö. then transferred to a detention center for adult IS members. When he returned to Germany in October, he was arrested at the airport in Frankfurt am Main and has been in custody ever since. He is accused of, among other things, dangerous bodily harm, coercion and intentional bodily harm. The court scheduled 16 days of hearings until the end of May.