Dutch woman receives 10-year sentence for enslaving a Yazidi

AMSTERDAM (AFP): A Dutch court Wednesday sentenced a woman to 10 years in prison for keeping a woman from the Yazidi minority as a slave after joining the Islamic State group in Syria.

The court in The Hague convicted the 33-year-old from Hengelo in eastern Netherlands, identified as Hasna A, for “enslavement, membership of a terrorist organization, promoting terrorist crimes, and endangering her young son.”

She traveled to Syria in 2015 with her son, aged four at the time, the court said. She married an IS fighter and had children with him.

Between May to October 2015, she lived with another IS fighter, who kept a Yazidi woman as a slave.

Hasna A. made the Yazidi woman do household chores for her and look after her son, the court ruled.

In 2014, Islamic State swept across swathes of Iraq, carrying out horrific violence against the Kurdish-speaking Yazidis, whose non-Muslim faith the extremists considered heretical.

The jihadists massacred thousands of men and abducted thousands of women and girls as sex slaves.

Hasna A enslaved the Yazidi woman knowing that her actions contributed to the “widespread and systematic attack on the Yazidi community,” the court said.

“The court holds this against the suspect very seriously. Crimes against humanity such as these are among the most serious international crimes there are,” judges said.

According to public broadcaster NOS, Hasna A was repatriated in November 2022 to the Netherlands from a Syrian prison camp with 11 other Dutch women and their 28 children.

The women were arrested upon arrival in the Netherlands.