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, 2024

A 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.

Photos of Kalashnikovs

It stands diametrically opposed to the threats that, according to the Public Prosecutor, she made on social media. For example, she wrote on Twitter, now X, that she was preparing to take the life of columnist Ebru Umar on sight, along with a photo of a Kalashnikov. She also reportedly wrote on Facebook to the journalist Brenda Stoter Boscolo that “it’s too bad that you don’t live around the corner, otherwise I would have come at you with my AK-47.”

Both women have suffered greatly from the threats and have had therapy to deal with it. Their attorney, Richard Körver: “These threats were made in a period when journalists were targeted by jihadists, think of the attack on Charlie Hebdo.” They want compensation for damages from S.”

S. herself denies the threats. She says that her husband, Anis, wrote the texts, and that he had access to her phone and social media accounts. Anis cannot explain any more about this. He is dead.

240 hours community service

On Friday, the Public Prosecutor demanded a jail sentence of 860 days, of which 720 days would be conditional, and community service of 240 hours. Since she has been in detention for a few months, S. does not have to go back to jail. “A long jail sentence of six to seven years would not be out of the ordinary, given the seriousness of the offenses. But we need to fight terrorism as effectively as possible, and if this lady went back to jail, the chance of recidivism would only be greater.” S. is easily influenced, and according to the psychologists, struggles with a borderline disorder. She is now staying in an assisted living project, while her two children live elsewhere.

Xaviera’s attorneys, Levy and Jurnet, are asking for an acquittal for plunder and threats. According to them, it is not proven that the woman from Apeldoorn knew that the house still belonged to other people. It was her husband who arranged the living quarters. In addition, it was he who reportedly placed the threatening tweets.

The verdict in the case will be on April 26.