Australia charges citizens over IS slavery crimes

For years, the so-called Islamic State (IS) not only abducted and enslaved thousands of Yazidi women and children, it also bureaucratised the system.

It produced ledgers, sales contracts and religious manuals governing the ownership, trade and abuse of captives.

Yet despite the extensive documentation of the crimes, only a small number of people around the world have ever been prosecuted.

Most of them have been women.

Australia has become one of the latest countries to charge its own citizens over alleged slavery crimes committed during IS's brutal rule across parts of Syria and Iraq.

Two Australian women who returned from Syria earlier this month were charged with crimes against humanity, while another woman faces terror-related offences.

Kawsar Abbas, 53, faces charges of enslavement, possessing a slave, using a slave and engaging in slave trading.

Zeinab Ahmad, 31, is charged with enslavement and use of a slave.

Australia's prosecutions reflect a growing international effort to confront the role some women allegedly played in facilitating and enforcing IS's system of enslavement, atrocities Australia recognised in 2018 as amounting to genocide.

Prosecutions around the globe

To date, most of the people charged overseas in relation to IS's system of enslavement have been women accused of helping facilitate, enforce or profit from it.

Germany led the world's first prosecutions over IS crimes against Yazidis in 2021, using universal jurisdiction laws to prosecute international crimes committed abroad.

Yazidis are a minority ethno-religious group primarily from northern Iraq that was systematically persecuted after IS' 2014 invasion.

A German IS member, identified only as Jennifer W in court documents, was the first person anywhere in the world to be put on trial for crimes against Yazidis.

The court found the then-30-year-old committed a crime against humanity after failing to prevent the death of an enslaved five-year-old Yazidi girl. After appeal, her prison sentence was increased from 10 years to 14.

Around the same time her husband Taha al-J was also convicted for his role in chaining the girl outside in scorching heat, where she died while her mother, also enslaved by the couple, was forced to watch.

Since then at least five other women in German courts have 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 also pursued similar cases in recent years.

Last year a Swedish court sentenced 52-year-old Lina Ishaq to 12 years in prison for holding three Yazidi women and six children as slaves in Raqqa, Syria, between 2014 and 2016.

Ishaq forced her prisoners to wear veils, practise Islam, and physically assaulted them.

"The convicted woman was part of the large-scale enslavement system which IS introduced for Yazidi women and children," said Stockholm District Court presiding judge Maria Ulfsdotter Klang.

"She has acted independently in maintaining the enslavement and deprivation of liberty of the victims and contributed to trafficking them further."

There was also a 2014 case against one of the widows of late IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who was convicted in Iraq of being complicit in the enslavement of Yazidi women in her home.

According to Iraq's judicial council, the woman was sentenced to death for "detaining Yazidi women in her home" and facilitating their kidnapping by "ISIS gangs in Sinjar", Reuters reported.

Lydia Khalil, a program director at the Lowy Institute and senior research fellow at Deakin University, said the prominence of women in slavery prosecutions partly reflects the collapse of the group's self-declared caliphate in 2019.

But experts also say the cases reflect growing recognition that some women under IS were not only victims of the group's deeply misogynistic rule, but active participants in enforcing and sustaining it.

The experts quoted in this story were speaking generally about documented roles women played under IS, not about the specific allegations against the Australian women whose matters are before the courts.

The crucial role of women in IS

Ms Khalil said IS differed from earlier Islamist groups because it encouraged some women to take on broader ideological and enforcement roles.

"Their participation was actually very important and critical to the Islamic State because women and families legitimised the entire project," she said.

"It wasn't just this kind of violent male adventure. It was a very purposeful social revolution that they were trying to enact."

Of the more than 41,000 international citizens from 80 countries who became affiliated with IS, up to 4,761 of these were women, according to the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation.

It is estimated between 30 and 40 of those women came from Australia.

Susan Hutchinson, a researcher at the Australian National University, said the "ISIS bride" label risked minimising the agency some women exercised under the group's rule.

"ISIS was absolutely a deeply misogynistic and patriarchal organisation, and no doubt that some of these women made some really stupid decisions," she said.

"But I think it's really important that we don't lose sight of individual power and agency that women have, even within patriarchal systems."

Ms Khalil pointed to the Al-Khansa brigade, an all-female IS morality police unit, which she said enforced dress codes, accompanied men on raids and helped control female captives.

She said former Yazidi slaves had described living under surveillance in family homes where some IS-affiliated women acted as "enforcers and controllers" within the slave system.

Ms Khalil said IS documents and testimonies also suggested some women were permitted to own slaves themselves.

"Some [FAQ] pamphlets make reference to the fact that Islamic State-affiliated women had a legal right to slave ownership," she said.

"For example, one of the rules is that a man can't have sex with a female slave if his wife owned her.

"There are also accounts of women continuing to hold captives even after male relatives had died."

Ms Hutchinson said discussions about women under IS required balancing two realities at once: recognising the role some women allegedly played in atrocities, without ignoring the misogynistic structure of the organisation itself.

"While women have been perpetrators, and they need to be held accountable for that, it did happen in the context of a patriarchal misogynistic organisation," she said.

"So it remains important that the men who were also perpetrators are held accountable."

Australia's groundbreaking case

Australia's prosecutions now place the country among a small group of nations attempting to use crimes against humanity laws to address IS's system of sexual slavery.

For the first time, Australia will prosecute the alleged slavery offences under Division 268 of the Criminal Code which deals with international crimes, including crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide.

The offences Ms Abbas and Ms Ahmad are facing each carry a maximum penalty of 25 years' imprisonment.

NSW Anti-slavery Commissioner Dr James Cockayne said the case was groundbreaking because prosecutors would need to prove not only the alleged acts themselves, but also the broader context in which they occurred.

He said the proceedings could become one of the first times an Australian court examines IS's system of organised sexual slavery in detail.

For some Yazidi advocates and survivors the charges mark a long-awaited step toward accountability.

"I am deeply relieved," says Ms Hutchinson, having campaigned for years for Australia to prosecute citizens who joined IS.

"For so long there has been no accountability for the Australians who have allegedly perpetrated crimes against the Yazidis, and now there is."