Dutch court sentences four women on IS terror charges

Dutch judges on Thursday sentenced four women to jail sentences of up to three years on terror charges, after they were repatriated from a Syrian refugee camp last year.

They were among five Dutch women and 11 children who arrived back in the Netherlands last February after an operation by the Dutch government to extradite them from the Al-Roj refugee camp in north-eastern Syria.

The women went on trial shortly afterwards in the Rotterdam District Court, facing charges of joining fighters of the now defunct Islamic Caliphate during the height of the Syrian civil war, and planning acts of terror.

“The women travelled to the battlefields in Syria and Iraq knowing that a war was going on there,” the judges said in a statement issued by the Rotterdam court.

“They joined ISIS there. Their husbands had positions with IS,” they said referring to the Islamic State terror group.

The sentences imposed on four of the women varied from 30 to 36 months in prison, of which 12 to 15 months were suspended.

“In addition, the women must comply with all kinds of special conditions,” including regularly reporting to the authorities, the judges said.

But they pointed out that the women have “explicitly renounced the IS ideology”.

The fifth woman was found not guilty on the terror charges, but was sentenced to 16 months, nine of those suspended, for “putting her child in a helpless condition by travelling to a war zone”.

“More and more is known about what the original population in the IS area had to endure and there are hardly words to describe the seriousness of it,” the judges said.

“Moreover, many of these crimes were committed with the explicit aim of instilling fear in the population in these areas and are therefore undeniably terrorist crimes,” they added.

The Dutch government repatriated the women after a court warned in 2021 that it may have to drop the charges against them if they were not brought back in a matter of months.

Around 300 Dutch jihadists travelled to Syria to join radical Islamic fighters from 2012 onwards, according to Dutch government figures.

About 100 have remained, many in camps and detention centres in northern Syria, Iraq and Turkey, while around 100 others have died, the Dutch secret service said.