MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — A Yazidi woman has alleged she shared a bedroom with a woman accused of enslaving her in Syria and was repeatedly raped and beaten by the woman’s father, police told a court on Thursday.
Zeinab Ahmad, 31, applied for bail in the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court on two slavery charges. The hearing resumes Friday.
She and her mother Kawsar Ahmad, 53, also known as Kawsar Abbas, have been in custody since they returned to Australia
from a Syrian refugee camp last month with a group of Australian women and children linked to the Islamic State group.
The Iraqi-born Yazidi witness, who cannot be named, said in a police statement that Mohammed Ahmad, Zeinab’s father and Kawsar’s husband, bought her for $10,000 in 2017 in the then-IS stronghold of Raqqa, Syria, Detective Senior Constable Mark Clendenning told the court.
Clendenning alleged Kawsar was involved in buying the teen as a slave, which was a rare role for a woman in the IS so-called caliphate.
“Mohammed and Kawsar had status and privileges within Islamic State usually not afforded to others that allowed exceptions to their usual practices,” Clendenning said.
The witness was brought into a house that the couple shared with their five daughters, including Zeinab, with whom the witness shared a room, Clendenning alleged.
Mohammed told the witness, “I bought you for the purpose of raping and at the same time serving the home,” according to Clendenning. He added that Mohammed introduced her to the family and told them, “I bought her for sex and to do housework.”
Zeinab’s first husband was killed in a drone attack in 2016, and she had remarried an Egyptian IS fighter, who had lost an arm in combat, police said.
Zeinab had been present when her father hit the witness and dragged her by the hair down two flights of stairs inside the house, police alleged. They said Mohammed, who is now in an Iraq prison, beat the witness two or three times a month while the family was present.
The witness said Mohammed sexually assaulted her “many times” despite her resisting, police said. The witness said Zeinab “did not physically hurt her, although she did threaten her very badly and ordered her to do things around the house,” Clendenning alleged.
Mohammed sold the witness for $10,000 in 2018, 16 months after she was bought, police said. Mohammed told the witness she was “bad” and did not do as she was told, according to police.
IS persecute the Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking ethno-religious minority mostly found in Syria, Iraq and Turkey.
The witness said she was 15 years old when she was among 6,800 Yazidi women and children enslaved and was traded between IS members 17 times over five years before she was freed by Kurdish forces in 2019.
Three generations of the Ahmad family moved from Melbourne to Syria via Turkey in 2013 and 2014. Zeinab flew there with her husband in 2014, police alleged.
Clendenning said releasing Zeinab from custody would pose an unacceptable risk of endangering the safety and welfare of the public.
She had married multiple men involved with IS and was currently married to an Egyptian IS member, whose whereabouts were unknown, he said.
“The accused has never explicitly renounced or stated that she no longer supports Islamic State since her surrender to Kurdish forces,” Clendenning said.
She is charged with two crimes against humanity: enslavement and use a slave. Each carries a maximum penalty of 25 years in prison.
