By Anugrah Kumar.
Australia has charged two women who returned from Syria this month with crimes against humanity over their alleged roles in the Islamic State’s system of sexual slavery, joining a small group of nations prosecuting citizens for enslavement offenses.
Among them is Germany, where an IS member is serving 14 years after being convicted in a case involving an enslaved 5-year-old Yazidi girl chained outside in scorching heat until she died while her mother, also held as a slave, was forced to watch.
Kawsar Abbas, 53, faces charges of enslavement, possessing a slave, using a slave and engaging in slave trading, according to ABC News. The other woman, Zeinab Ahmad, 31, is charged with enslavement and use of a slave. A third woman faces terror-related offenses.
The charges each carry a maximum penalty of 25 years in prison and are being brought for the first time under Division 268 of Australia’s Criminal Code, which covers crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide.
New South Wales Anti-slavery Commissioner James Cockayne said the proceedings would mark the first time an Australian court explored IS’s system of chattel slavery in detail.
“This will be the first exploration of this kind of chattel slavery, which [IS] really revived after about 150 years of not seeing it around the world,” he told ABC.
IS abducted and enslaved thousands of Yazidi women and children after invading northern Iraq in 2014, administering the system through ledgers, sales contracts and religious manuals governing the ownership, trade and abuse of captives. Australia recognized those atrocities as genocide in 2018.
Of more than 41,000 international citizens from 80 countries affiliated with IS, 4,761 were women, according to the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation. An estimated 30 to 40 of those women came from Australia.
IS’ all-female Al-Khansa brigade enforced dress codes, accompanied men on raids and helped control female captives, with some reportedly running brothels of Yazidi sex slaves. IS documents and testimony indicated some women were permitted to own slaves themselves, with IS pamphlets stating women affiliated with the group held a legal right to slave ownership.
One rule specified that a man could not have sexual relations with a female slave if his wife owned her.
Germany led the world’s first prosecutions for IS crimes against Yazidis in 2021, using universal jurisdiction laws allowing prosecution of international crimes committed abroad. In one case, a member identified in court documents only as Jennifer W. was convicted of a crime against humanity for failing to prevent the death of an enslaved 5-year-old Yazidi girl.
Her husband, Taha al-J., was separately convicted for chaining the child outside in scorching heat until she died while the girl’s mother, also held as a slave by the couple, was forced to watch. After an appeal, Jennifer W.’s sentence was increased from 10 to 14 years.
Germany’s Federal Court of Justice in February 2024 rejected Jennifer W.’s appeal against her 14-year sentence as “manifestly unfounded,” making the sentencing decision final, according to Yazda. She had been sentenced in August 2023 to 14 years for crimes against humanity, war crimes and membership in a foreign terrorist organization.
Now 34, Jennifer W. traveled to Syria in 2014 to join IS with her then-husband. She held a Yazidi woman and her 5-year-old daughter, Reda, as slaves in their home in Fallujah, Iraq. The captives were deprived of sufficient food, forced to follow Islamic rules and subjected to almost daily beatings. Reda died after Taha al-J. tied her with a cable to the bars of an outside window and left her hanging in heat reaching about 122 degrees Fahrenheit.
Jennifer W. could have intervened but did nothing, while the girl’s mother was held just yards away inside the house and forced to watch her daughter die. The case was brought to trial after the NGO Yazda identified and interviewed the mother, who served as the key witness.
At least five other women in German courts have since been convicted of crimes against humanity and war crimes related to the enslavement and abuse of Yazidis. Courts in the Netherlands, Sweden and France have pursued similar cases.
Last year, a Swedish court sentenced Lina Ishaq, 52, to 12 years in prison for holding three Yazidi women and six children as slaves in Raqqa, Syria, between 2014 and 2016, according to ABC.
Ishaq forced her prisoners to wear veils, practice Islam and endure physical assaults. Stockholm District Court Presiding Judge Maria Ulfsdotter Klang said Ishaq “was part of the large-scale enslavement system which IS introduced for Yazidi women and children” and that she “contributed to trafficking them further.”
In 2024, one of the widows of late IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was convicted in Iraq and sentenced to death for detaining Yazidi women in her home and facilitating their kidnapping, according to Iraq’s judicial council.
IS fighters also detained, tortured and forcibly married Sunni Arab women and girls in Iraqi territory under their control, Human Rights Watch documented in a report published in February.
Researchers interviewed six women in Kirkuk who had escaped from Hawija, 78 miles south of Mosul, and recorded accounts of rape, forced marriage, physical assault and prolonged detention.
Shireen, a 31-year-old Yazidi woman who testified before a U.S. House Foreign Affairs subcommittee in 2017 under a pseudonym, said IS jihadis committed some of the worst acts against her and other Yazidis, including forced conversions, sexual enslavement and mass killings, as previously reported by The Christian Post.
Her family was captured on Aug. 3, 2014, near Sinjar as IS advanced and Kurdish forces withdrew. At a government office inside Sinjar district, IS militants separated Yazidi girls from the rest of the captives by force. Shireen’s 15-year-old sister, Sahera, was the second girl taken. Shireen said she was holding her hand and begging militants not to take her when one struck her in the back with a weapon.
One of the worst experiences of Shireen’s captivity was an abdominal surgery performed on her by IS in Mosul.
“Until now, I am suffering from the effects of it,” she told the subcommittee. “I don’t know why they operated on me or what kind of a procedure was done on my body.”
It was widely reported that IS harvested organs from some of its Yazidi captives to finance its terror campaign.
