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THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — A Dutch court has convicted a woman of crimes against humanity for keeping a Yazidi woman as a slave in Syria and sentenced her to 10 years in prison.
The Hague District Court on Wednesday found Hasna A. guilty of multiple offenses for traveling to Syria in 2015, to join the Islamic State group. Hasna, who took along her then 4-year-old son, married a fighter and was given a Yazidi woman as a domestic servant.
The case was the first brought by prosecutors in the Netherlands for attacks against the Yazidis, a religious minority from northwestern Iraq, near the Syrian border.
In August 2014, militants stormed through northern Iraq, determined to erase the tiny, insular religious group they considered heretics. They killed men and boys, sold women into sex slavery or forced them to convert and marry militants. Some 300,000 fled.
IS was defeated in 2017, but less than half of those who fled returned to the Yazidi heartland around the city of Sinjar.
“Thousands of Yazidi women and girls were taken to other parts of Iraq and Syria and subjected to slavery,” judge Jacco Snoeijer said. The victim was referred to in court only by the initial Z.
Hasna A., 33, was one of 12 women repatriated to the Netherlands, together with their 28 children, from a refugee camp in northern Syria in 2022. She has been held in detention since her return, while her children were taken into care by child protection services.
The Dutch government had refused to bring the women home until a court ruled that if they were not returned, proceedings against them could not continue in absentia.
The public prosecution service had asked for a sentence of eight years but the court went with 10 years, in part because Hasna A. still expressed extremist views.
From a shielded witness booth, Z. testified during the trial. Her own son had been taken to an Islamic State Group fighting camp.
“I begged her to let me call my son, but that was not allowed,” the woman said.
Hasna A., whose full name was not released in line with Dutch privacy laws, denied the accusations. During a hearing in October she claimed her husband was responsible for Z. “I lived my own life, withdrawn into my own room. I made my own bed and cleaned my own room,” she told the judges.
Prosecutors had charged her with enslaving a second Yazidi woman but the judges found that victim’s statements to be too unreliable for a conviction.
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