The participation of the Netherlands and Belgium in the investigation into the atrocities committed against the Yazidi minority in Syria and Iraq has been announced by the European Union’s judicial cooperation agency on Monday.
The Joint Investigation Team, which was established in October 2021 by France and Sweden and is supported by Eurojust in The Hague, aims to identify and prosecute foreign extremists who specifically targeted Yazidis during the armed conflict in Syria and Iraq.
According to Eurojust, the collaborative efforts of the team have already yielded positive results, including the identification of a Yazidi victim of a French jihadist couple in France. This discovery led to the addition of charges of genocide and crimes against humanity to an existing case.
The joint investigation team is part of a wider international endeavor to ensure accountability for the atrocities committed against the Yazidis, a minority group that has been regarded as heretics by the Islamic State militant organization.
In 2021, a United Nations investigation concluded that the crimes perpetrated against the Yazidis by Islamic State extremists constituted genocide.
In August 2014, the Islamic State (IS) launched an attack on the heartland of the Yazidi community near Sinjar Mountain. This assault resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Yazidis and the abduction of 6,417 individuals, with over half of them being women and girls. Many of the adult men who were captured were likely killed, while the women and girls were subjected to rape and forced servitude.
In Europe, prosecutions of returning foreign militants for crimes against Yazidis are already underway. Recently, a German woman was found guilty of holding a Yazidi woman as a slave during her time with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. She was sentenced to nine years and three months in prison by a state court in Koblenz, which convicted her of crimes against humanity, membership in a foreign terrorist organization, and being an accessory to genocide. The woman’s identity has been kept anonymous in accordance with German privacy regulations and is referred to as Nadine K.
Furthermore, Dutch authorities announced in February that they were prosecuting a woman from the Netherlands for the crime of slavery as a crime against humanity. The woman allegedly enslaved a Yazidi woman in Syria in 2015. This case marks the first trial in the Netherlands of an alleged IS member for crimes committed against a Yazidi victim.
