Dutch woman sentenced to 10 years for keeping Yazidi slave

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (CN) — A Dutch court has sentenced a woman to 10 years in prison for crimes against humanity for keeping a Yazidi woman as a slave in Syria, in the first case against the minority group in the Netherlands.

Hasna Aarab was found guilty of slavery as well as joining a terrorist organization and endangering the welfare of a child by The Hague District Court, two years after she was repatriated to the Netherlands from a refugee camp.

“Thousands of Yazidi women and girls were taken to other parts of Iraq and Syria and subjected to slavery. Due to the scale and systematic nature of this, the court labels the attack on the Yazidi and the enslavement of Yazidi women as a crime against humanity,” the court said in a statement.

The 33-year-old traveled to Syria in 2015 along with her 4-year-old son to join the Islamic State group. “I wanted to build a new life in the caliphate,” she told the court in October.

While living in Raqqa, she married an Islamic State group fighter and had three more children.

Aarab has denied the charges against her, claiming that her husband gave her the place to live with the two women and that she was not in charge of the household.

Prosecutors claim she forced two women to work as domestic servants, though the judges only found the testimony of one of the women reliable enough for a conviction.

The women, referred to by the court as Z. and S. for privacy reasons, say they were forced to cook and clean for the household in Raqqa.

“How could she live with herself that I had to live separated from my children, while she was also a mother who couldn’t bear to be without her children for even a minute? I burned inside when I saw her with her son while I did not have my own children around me,” Z. testified. She was in the high security courtroom near Schiphol Airport but was obscured by a screen while addressing the court.

The prosecution had asked for a sentence of eight years but the three judge panel opted for 10 years, citing Aarab’s continued extremist beliefs as part of the reason.

Ten years ago, Islamic State group fighters carried out a series of atrocities against Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking minority whose religion incorporates Zoroastrian, Christian, Manichean, Jewish and Muslim elements. The Islamic State group accused Yazidis of being devil worshippers, killing more than 3,000 people and taking thousands more women and children as slaves.

The Yazidis have suffered persecution for centuries and the United Nations investigators declared what happened against them in 2014 genocide.

Aarab was one of 12 women and 28 children repatriated to the Netherlands from the Al Roj camp in northern Syria in 2021. The women were arrested upon arrival. The Dutch government initially resisted bringing them back to the Netherlands, but in 2022, a judge ruled that if they were left in Syria the cases against them would be dropped.

Germany was the first country to put someone from the Islamic State group on trial for mistreatment of the Yazidis. In 2021, a German woman was sentenced to 10 years in prison by a Munich court for letting a 5-year-old Yazidi girl she and her husband kept as a slave in Iraq die of thirst after she was chained in the scorching desert sun for wetting a mattress.

Using a legal principle known as universal jurisdiction, the Dutch have pursued Aarab for crimes against humanity. Universal jurisdiction rests on the idea that some crimes — genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and torture — are so serious that offenders can be tried in any jurisdiction.

Follow @mollyquell