Dutch IS woman used female slave as ‘disenfranchised object’ | Interior

According to the Public Prosecution Service in the Rotterdam court, it was ‘a special day’ on Tuesday. For the first time, a Dutch Syrian traveler has to answer in court for crimes against the Yazidis, a people in northern Iraq that was attacked by IS in 2014. Thousands of Yazidi men were murdered, women and children taken to other parts of Iraq or Syria and used as slaves in the caliphate. Hundreds of women were not heard from after the fall of IS, hundreds of others still live in refugee camps.

“The Yazidi community has had to wait a long time for this,” said the OM. Representatives of that community sat in the public gallery. “This is finally a step towards justice,” said Wahhab Hassoo, one of those representatives.

According to the Public Prosecution Service, Hasna A. (now 31) from Hengelo lived in the summer of 2015 in a house in Raqqa, the then capital of the IS caliphate. In that house, belonging to IS fighter Abou Achmed, a woman was present who was used as a slave. That woman was heard by UN investigators and told that she had to cook and clean every day for Hasna and her son. She also had to look after that son, a toddler with autism. “Hasna also hit people, but not me.” Two other Yazidi women have confirmed that Hasna was indeed present in the house.

“Slavery carries a maximum life sentence,” the Public Prosecution Service stated during Tuesday’s session. “The women who were used as slaves were also often abused and raped by IS fighters. IS treated them as lawless objects that you could do whatever you wanted with it. The suspect used the woman as such an object.” Whether the woman was also raped by Abou Achmed, the man in the house, was not discussed during the case.

Hasna A. herself has not yet made any statements to the police and was not at the pro forma hearing on Tuesday. She does not deny having lived in the house. Her lawyer De Boer said she ‘did not want to play down the suffering of the Jezidis’. “But Hasna stayed in a house where someone else had a woman as a slave. She had to stay in that house of her own husband. She herself had no choice. She never gave the woman any assignments herself.”

Hasna A. left for IS territory in Syria in March 2015, taking her son (then 4) with her. Her departure for the caliphate came as no surprise at the time. Her school in Hengelo and the municipality of Hengelo had suspicions about her plans and had also spoken extensively with her. The roc was still trying to pull the emergency brake.

Teachers said Hasna was becoming more and more rabid in her religious fanaticism. “Unfortunately we couldn’t stop her. Very disappointing that that failed,” said mayor Schelberg after her departure. Not much later, photos surfaced of the young child in a camouflage suit and with an IS hat. A.’s father responded appalled at the suspicions against his daughter.

Twelve Dutch IS women will appear before the court in Rotterdam on Tuesday and Wednesday. They were picked up by the Netherlands in November from a detention camp in Syria. The local Kurdish rulers do not want to try them there and want to get rid of the thousands of foreign women. The Netherlands took them back because waiting longer could mean that the women could no longer be prosecuted here.

They are all being prosecuted for membership of a terrorist organization: the Islamic State. Some of them are also being prosecuted for specific cases, such as enslavement, looting or kidnapping of a minor child.

Another woman, Krista van T., is being prosecuted for looting, an international (war) crime. She is said to have lived with her family (Dutch IS fighter and their four children) in houses whose owners had been chased away or killed. Those houses were in the Syrian cities of Tabqa and Raqqa, the latter city was seen by IS as the capital of their caliphate. She wrote in text messages to her parents that she “lives in a house of an infidel who has fled.” And that her husband ‘took that big house in Raqqa’.

Crisolita V. (34) from Rotterdam has another suspicion in her file. She left for Syria in 2015 with her two children (then 8 and 6 years old). The fathers of the children had not given permission for this. According to the OM, this is about kidnapping. “She also took her children to a very unsafe area.” When she returned in November, V. now had four children, she had two more in Syria with an IS fighter.

During the case against two sisters from Alkmaar, Amina and Amal E., it turned out that the Public Prosecution Service is now in possession of a ‘data carrier’ (possibly a laptop or a mobile phone) that may contain more information about the so-called women’s battalions of IS, which formed a vice police that had to enforce religious rules.

In total, about ninety Dutch adults have already returned from the conflict zone in Syria and Iraq. Hundreds of others have died in the civil war, and about a hundred others are still in Syria or Turkey.