The Public Prosecution Service (OM) demands eight years in prison against the first IS woman who was brought back from Syria by a Dutch delegation. The woman was picked up from a Kurdish prison camp in June 2021. The Public Prosecution Service accuses the woman of participating in two terrorist organizations, IS and Jabhat Al Nusra.
“For both organizations degrading crimes such as beheadings were normal. They are responsible for death and destruction in Syria and Iraq,” said the public prosecutor.
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 a women’s battalion in the city of Raqqa. In the combat battalion Khatiba Nusaybah, women were trained to fight and learned how to handle weapons. The Dutch would have given training courses to dozens of women.
In addition, the couple was affiliated with the armed rebel group Jabhat Al Nusra. Before this, the two 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 in the fall of Raqqa in August 2017, after which the woman was imprisoned in the camp, where the Netherlands collected her with her three children in 2021. Her husband was sentenced to death in Iraq for using chemical weapons. He is awaiting the execution of this sentence.
The court in Rotterdam will rule on the woman’s case on 1 June.
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