AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – A Dutch court on Wednesday sentenced a woman to 10 years in prison for joining Islamic State in Syria and keeping a Yazidi woman as slave.
Prosecutors had asked for an 8-year sentence for the Dutch woman, 33-year old Hasna Aarab, but the District Court in The Hague said the gravity of slavery as a crime against humanity required a stronger punishment.
Judges said it was clear that Aarab had actively participated in the enslavement of a Yazidi woman between 2015 and 2016, while she lived in Raqqa with her young son and her Islamic State fighter husband.
The Yazidi woman, identified only as Z., had been forced to work in their household, where she was also sexually abused.
Aarab knew of Z.’s dire situation and made it worse by ordering her to do household work and take care of her son, the judges said.
“She did this, knowing that what happened in her house was part of a widespread, systemic attack on the Yazidi community,” the court said.
“These types of crimes against humanity are among the worst international crimes possible.”
Islamic State controlled swathes of Iraq and Syria from 2014-2017, before being defeated in its last bastions in Syria in 2019.
It viewed the Yazidis, an ancient religious minority, as devil worshippers and killed more than 3,000 of them, as well as enslaving 7,000 Yazidi women and girls and displacing most of the 550,000-strong community from its ancestral home in northern Iraq.
Aarab was also convicted of joining a terrorist organisation, of enabling acts of terrorism and for putting the life of her young child at risk.
She had been accused of slavery by two women, but the court said there was not enough proof of the accusations of the other woman, identified as S.
Aarab had told the court earlier in the trial that she moved from the Netherlands to Islamic State-held territory in Syria in 2015 with her son to try to change her life for the better.
But she had denied taking an active part in the enslavement of the women and told judges the Yazidi victims were lying when they said she gave them orders and forced them to pray.
Aarab was held in Kurdish detention camps after the fall of IS and was repatriated by the Dutch government in 2022.
(Reporting by Bart Meijer; Editing by Toby Chopra)
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