Many thanks to Gary Fouse for translating this article from the Algemeen Dagblad:
Children’s slippers still lay on the ground, ISIS wife Xaviera prosecuted for plunder in Syria
The Dutch ISIS wife Xaviera S. from Apeldoorn must still be prosecuted because she allegedly engaged in plunder in Syria, a war crime. She is the first to be prosecuted for this offense in the Netherlands. She also allegedly threatened a Dutch columnist and a journalist with death while in Syria. She herself blames her deceased husband.
by Cyril Rosman
March 1, 2024A pan of rice was still on the counter. And children’s slippers still lay on the carpet by the mattresses. Yet the Dutch traveler to Syria, Xaviera S. (now 30), never asked her husband how he actually came into possession of that house in that Syrian village. “He always told me not to interfere.”
She also didn’t ask when they later moved several times, including to Raqqa, then the capital of the ISIS caliphate. There she lived, among other places, on the top floor of a villa. Her husband’s second wife lived on the first floor. And some of the houses, according to the prosecution were clearly left behind by refugees.
First Dutch woman
Taking possession of houses and their contents for yourself is plunder, and therefore a war crime, the Public Prosecutor’s office argued Friday in The Hague court. “The impact of looting is huge. Not just for individual people, but also for the rebuilding of the country”. S is the first Dutch ISIS wife to be brought to trial for this offense, but there are now more cases in progress.
The Apeldoorn woman asked no questions of her husband, the Dutch jihadist Anis Z. But she suspected then, as she confirmed Friday, that the houses may have belonged to people “who did not follow the rules of ISIS”. “And at that time, I could agree.”
Xaviera S. traveled to the conflict zone in 2014. The Apeldoorn woman of Netherlands/Antilles origin had been deep in problems in the years prior (drinking, smoking drugs, debts), for which Youth Care Services took her son away. She converted to Islam. “I wanted a purpose in my life.”
Married via Skype
But Xaviera soon winds up in radical circles. Via Skype, she enters into an Islamic marriage with Anis Z., a known jihadist who is in Syria. Without seeing him, she travels there not long afterwards.
“In reality, he was a completely different person than via Skype,” she says about Anis in court. In addition to Xaviera, the Dutch citizen had three other wives, also Dutch. Anis blew himself up in 2015 in a suicide attack for ISIS. Xaviera remarried another jihadist, the Dutch-Algerian Mokhtar M.
In 2018, after the fall of the ISIS caliphate, Xaviera was in jail in Turkey for 1½ years. At the end of 2019, she returned to the Netherlands, where she was taken into custody. In May 2020 she was provisionally released because she was in the last stages of pregnancy.
She is back in court on Friday. The woman in the Hague courtroom no longer looks anything like the tightly-veiled ISIS wife who threatened people with death from the caliphate. Xaviera has her hair in a bun, wears jeans and a sweater, and has tattoos and a nose piercing. She no longer feels like a Muslim. She answers all questions calmly.