The District Court of The Hague has sentenced a 49-year-old Islamist mother and wife of a jihadi to seven years in prison for allowing her then 13-year-old son from a previous marriage to enroll as a fighter in the terrorist outfit Islamic State (ISIS).
The mother allowed her daughter to marry an ISIS fighter twice at a young age.
On June 5, the Dutch court convicted the woman, identified only as Ayada K., of war crimes and endangering her children by aiding and abetting the recruitment of a child soldier, a press release from the court stated.
Ayada left Naaldwijk, in the province of South Holland, for Syria in 2014 with her then 14-
year-old daughter Safia and 13-year-old son Abdallah. She allowed her son to join the ISIS military police as a child soldier. Abdallah died two years later while serving in an ISIS military unit during fighting near the Syrian city of Raqqa, according to the court’s verdict.
The court found that there was sufficient evidence to conclude that Ayada took the risk of taking her children to Syria, knowing fully well that her children would end up in a life-threatening situation in the land where ISIS had established a Caliphate at the height of its power.
Islamist Mother Guilty of International Child Abduction
The verdict confirmed that Ayada did not intervene when her son was sent to two ISIS training camps, nor did she prevent her son from carrying out duties for ISIS’s military police. ISIS records show that the son participated in two camps: a so-called Sharia camp and a so-called Askari camp, both camps for religious and military training.
Further, the mother allowed her daughter to marry an ISIS fighter twice at a young age. The judge also reprimanded her for doing nothing to get the two teenagers out of Syria.
Moreover, Ayada did not inform the father of the two teenagers that she was taking them into a war zone. Instead, the court heard that the ex-husband had given permission for the trip because Ayada had told him that she was taking the children on vacation to Turkey. Prosecutors argued that this made her guilty of international child abduction.
According to the court’s press release, Ayada left Schiphol airport with her children for Istanbul on October 20, 2014, after which she traveled by bus to the border region of Eastern Turkey and Syria. In early November 2014, she crossed the border on foot with her children into Syria.
Abdallah is also said to have supported his mother with the income he received from ISIS for his work. Prosecutors described this as the use of children under the age of 15 in hostilities by an armed group, an international crime.
Court Ruling Details Ayada’s ISIS Involvement
In Raqqa, Ayada shared a household with the convicted Danish-Palestinian jihadist Jacob el-Ali, who became the first foreign fighter to be convicted of high treason by a Danish court in 2022 for joining ISIS. Prosecutors argued that this was evidence of Ayada’s participation in ISIS activities.
The court ruled that Ayada “embraced the extremist ideology of IS and stayed in IS-controlled areas for years, until the end when the caliphate fell. Consequently, by her presence there, she strengthened the power of IS.”
Ayada was also found guilty of benefiting financially from her son’s work for ISIS. The court further ruled that she facilitated the commission of terrorist offenses by facilitating her husband in his work as an ISIS fighter during her marriage by managing the joint household and caring for him.
In determining the sentence, the court took into account that, after the fall of the caliphate, the woman “stayed in detention camps for a prolonged period under deplorable conditions and consequently suffered significant negative consequences from her actions.”
Multiple Mothers Convicted of Traveling With Children to ISIS Territory
While the verdict stated that Ayada is the first woman to be convicted in the Netherlands for complicity in the recruitment and deployment of child soldiers, other women have been found guilty of traveling with their underage children to ISIS war zones.
In April 2023, a Dutch court sentenced five ISIS women, Nawal H. from Schiedam, Amber K. from Dordrecht, Naima E. from Zoetermeer, Mereym S. from Utrecht, and Hafida H. from Delft, to prison for taking their children to Syria.
Four received prison sentences of two and a half to three years. Naima E. from Zoetermeer was sentenced to 16 months in prison (of which nine were suspended) “because she placed her child in a helpless state by traveling to a war zone.”
Nawal H., who left for Syria with her husband and three children, also received a three-year prison sentence, of which 15 months were suspended. “In addition, the women spent more than four years with their children in a detention camp in Syria, where it was established that the conditions were appalling,” the verdict stated.
The five women left separately for Syria starting in 2013 to join ISIS, usually by marrying a fighter from the Netherlands. After ISIS was defeated in 2019, the women were arrested by Kurdish troops and imprisoned in a detention camp in northern Syria. They were brought back to the Netherlands, together with their eleven children, to appear before the Dutch court.
Four of the women were charged with participating in and contributing to a terrorist outfit by caring for their husbands, ISIS fighters. They also lived in houses arranged by IS, and their husbands received salaries from that group.
A second group of twelve women and 28 children was later returned to the Netherlands. Since 2012, around three hundred Dutch citizens have gone to Syria and Iraq to join jihadi outfits like ISIS. Over 100 fighters from the Netherlands were killed, while 90 adults and 80 children returned.
