Victims describe life in IS captivity in first Dutch Yazidi trial 

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (CN) — Two women kept as slaves by members of the Islamic State militant group described their experiences in captivity, including losing children, in a Dutch court on Wednesday.

The women, referred to by the court as Z. and S. for privacy reasons, say they were forced to cook and clean for Hasna Aarab, a 33-year-old Dutch woman who has been charged with crimes against humanity at The Hague District Court.

“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,” S. testified. She was present in the high security courtroom near Schiphol airport but was obscured by a screen while addressing the court.

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. IS accused the group of being devil worshippers, killed more than 3,000 Yazidis and took thousands more women and children as slaves.

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

Aarab traveled to Syria in 2015 along with her four-year-old son to join IS. “I wanted to build a new life in the caliphate,” she told the court on Monday.

While living in Raqqa, she married an IS fighter and had three more children. Her attorneys have said her husband gave her the place to live with the two women, and Aarab was not in charge of the household.

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 to 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.

In addition to the charge of slavery, an international crime, Aarab is charged with being a member of a terrorist organization and child endangerment. Several of the dozen women she returned with have been convicted of similar crimes.

Germany was the first country to put someone from IS 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.

It is the first time a woman has been charged with slavery in the Netherlands.

Prosecutors have asked for an eight-year sentence if Hasna A. is convicted. “The Yazidis are the only real victims here,” prosecutor Corjan Kroon told the court, pushing back on the defense narrative and their client was a victim of IS herself.

The Hague court has convicted a number of other people for other international crimes in recent years.

In 2022, judges convicted an Afghan refugee of war crimes for abusing prisoners in Afghanistan in the 1980s and ordered him to spend 12 years behind bars. Earlier this year, the first pro-government Syrian defendant was convicted in the Netherlands when a former militia commander was sentenced to 12 years in prison for complicity in torture and illegal detention.

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