Accused of participating in slavery. The trial of a Dutch citizen has started

On Monday, the trial of Dutch citizen Hasna Aarab, who joined the so-called Islamic State (IS) in 2015, began in The Hague and is accused of crimes against humanity for keeping two Yazidi women as domestic slaves. The Netherlands is only the second country to put an IS member on trial for crimes against humanity against the Yazidis, an ethno-religious minority.

Prosecutors say Aarab went to Syria with her 4-year-old child in 2015 to marry a Moroccan IS fighter. From May 1 to August 1 this year, she lived in the house of her husband's friend in Raqqa, the capital of the self-proclaimed Islamic caliphate.

The prosecutor's office estimates that the woman knew about the attack on the Yazidis and knew that the women kept in the house (identified during the trial as Z and S) were slaves. Aarab denied that they were abused or intimidated.

– It was clear that Z was a slave, but I did not notice any abuse – she testified. She said that “she was controlled by her then-husband and never gave any orders to the Yazidi women.”

Aarab is one of 12 Dutch citizens repatriated with 28 children from camps in Syria, where they were sent after the fall of IS. All were arrested upon arrival in the Netherlands, which in 2021 recognized IS attacks on Yazidis as genocide. Although several other countries have made similar decisions, so far only Dutch and German prosecutors have taken any action – the Justice Info portal wrote a year ago.

The so-called Islamic State, an extremist Sunni organization seeking to create a caliphate ruled by Islamic religious law, controlled areas of Iraq and Syria in 2014-2017. The Yazidis were perceived as Satan worshipers and persecuted.

During the offensive against them, over three thousand Yazidi men were killed and approximately seven thousand Yazidi women and girls were taken prisoner. They were given away, sold and bought, used for slave labor and raped.