3.5 years in prison for the first Syrian gangster picked up by the Netherlands | NOW

On Wednesday, the court in Rotterdam imposed 3.5 years in prison (of which one year on probation) on the first Syrian gangster who was retrieved by the Netherlands. The woman took part in the terrorist organizations IS and Jabhat al Nusra.

The Public Prosecution Service (OM) had also accused the woman of participating in a women’s battalion and providing combat training in Raqqa. But according to the court, there is too little evidence for those suspicions. That is why the imposed sentence of 3.5 years in prison is a lot lower than the eight-year sentence demanded by the Public Prosecution Service.

The woman stated in court that she lived in a bubble in Syria and did not know what was going on outside the home. The judge does not believe her “in view of the abundance of information she was able to consult, the length of her stay in Syria, the position of her husband and the content of her chat messages”.

In addition to the prison sentence, the judge imposes a number of special conditions on the woman if she is released again. These are contact bans and a ban on entering international airports.

Woman left for Syria in 2013 with her husband

The woman from Gouda left for Syria in 2013 with her husband to join IS. In doing so, she not only supported her husband as an IS fighter, but was also part of the combat battalion Khatiba Nusaybah. In it, women were trained to fight and learned to handle weapons.

Until the end of May, the couple was affiliated with the armed rebel group Jabhat al Nusra. The two then stayed in different places in Syria. The couple had firearms and the woman enthusiastically made propaganda for life at IS via social media, according to the OM.

The two were captured at the fall of Raqqa in August 2017, after which she was imprisoned in the camp. The Netherlands collected the woman and her three children there in 2021. Her husband has been sentenced to death in Iraq for the use of chemical weapons and is awaiting the execution of this sentence.

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