Dutch prosecutor suspects Islamic State woman of holding Yezidi woman as slave in Syria

THE HAGUE, Netherlands – For the first time, the Dutch prosecutor’s office is charging an Islamic State (IS) woman with holding a Yezidi woman as a slave. The enslavement allegedly took place in 2015 in Syria. She is now suspected of slavery as a crime against humanity.

Custody of the IS-woman was handed over to Dutch authorities in November 2022 by authorities of the Democratic Autonomous Administration (DAA) of North and East Syria. The woman stayed in a camp in the DAA and was handed over together with 10 other women with Dutch citizenship and their 33 children. The women are held in the terrorist wards of Dutch prisons.

Tens of Dutch women have traveled to the so-called Islamic State Caliphate where they married IS fighters and helped in the Islamic armed struggle.

Yezidi Genocide by Islamic State

In August of 2014, during the violent conflict in Iraq, IS and other terrorist groups entered the conflict zone and took control of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul after the Iraqi Army and the Peshmerga loyal to the Barzani family fled the area. The advance forced non-Muslim minority groups such as the Yezidis and the Chaldeans-Syriacs-Assyrians to flee their historic areas in Shigur (Sinjar/Shengal) and Nineveh Plains.

Related: Sexual Slavery as State Doctrine – “They were a huge attraction” by Alfred Hackensberger

Amid the inability of the Iraqi government and the international community to protect them, the Yezidi people were subjected to the most heinous, barbaric, and inhuman crimes by IS. The Islamic State kidnapped more than 6,000 Yezidis during its attack on Shigur. Many Yezidi girls were used as slaves.

According to Nadia’s Initiative, a non-profit organization set up by Nobel Prize winner Nadia Murad, some 2,800 women and children are still missing and tens of thousand of Yezidis from Shigur remain displaced within Iraqi territory.

Several mass graves of Yezidis killed by the terrorist organization have been discovered. According to official statistics, 27 of the 87 discovered mass graves have been opened in various areas of Shigur.

On January 19, 2023, the German Bundestag recognized the massacres committed by the Islamic State against the Yezidis of Shigur as genocide. The German recognition of the genocide follows recognition by Belgium, the Netherlands, and France, among others.

Related: The man who frees enslaved Yezidi women from the clutches of IS by Alfred Hackensberger