A Dutch court on Wednesday sentenced a woman to 10 years in prison for joining Islamic State in Syria and enslaving a Yazidi woman.
Prosecutors had sought an 8-year sentence for the Dutch woman, 33-year-old Hasna Arab, but the district court in The Hague said the seriousness of slavery as a crime against humanity required a harsher sentence.
The judges said it was clear that Arab 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 ISIS terrorist husband.
The Yazidi woman, identified only as Z, was forced to work in their household. She was also sexually exploited.
Aarab was aware of Z’s serious condition and made it worse by ordering her to do household chores and look after their son, the judges said.
“She did so despite knowing that what happened in her home was part of a broader, systemic attack on the Yazidi community,” the court said.
“These types of crimes against humanity are probably among the worst international crimes.”
The Islamic State controlled large parts of Iraq and Syria from 2014–2017, before losing its last strongholds in Syria in 2019.
It saw the Yazidis, an ancient religious minority, as devil worshipers and killed more than 3,000 of them, as well as enslaved 7,000 Yazidi women and girls and deported most of the 550,000-strong community to their homes in northern Iraq. Displaced from ancestral home.
Aarab was also convicted of joining a terrorist organisation, promoting terrorist acts and endangering the life of her young child.
He was accused of slavery by two women, but the court said there was not enough evidence for the allegations by the second woman, identified as S.
Arab told the court earlier in the trial that she moved from the Netherlands to ISIS-held territory in Syria with her son in 2015 to try to improve her life.
But he denied taking an active part in enslaving the women and told judges that Yazidi victims were lying when they said he had given them orders and forced them to pray.
Arab was held in Kurdish detention camps after the fall of IS and was deported by the Dutch government in 2022.
