A woman from Hengelo who went to Syria in 2015 and married an IS fighter has been jailed for 10 years for crimes against humanity, endangering the life of her son and membership of a terrorist organisation.

The sentence is the longest handed down to a Jihadi bride by a Dutch court, and reflects the fact that Hasna A had an enslaved Yazidi woman working in her household.  

Hasna A was part of a group of 12 Dutch women and their children who were repatriated to the Netherlands from a Syrian refugee camp in 2022.

During the hearing last month, the court was told A and her husband kept two Yazidi women as domestic servants to cook and clean. Hasna A also allegedly forced them to pray. The Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking people, practice Yazidism, a pre-Zoroastrian Iranian religion.

One of the two women, referred to Z for her own privacy, was at the highly secure court at Schiphol during the hearing and gave a victim impact statement accusing Hasna A of extreme cruelty.

“Partly because of people like her I have lost two daughters. She has hurt me very much,” she said, speaking through a translator.

Her evidence was considered to be conclusive but there was not enough evidence that a second woman, known as S, had been kept as a slave, the court said.

The public prosecution department had called for an eight-year jail term but the court decided to sentence A to 10.

The court said that when taking the seriousness of the offences into account, “the only appropriate response is prison sentence of a duration longer than that requested by the public prosecutor”.