MELBOURNE, Australia — A disturbing case of alleged wartime enslavement tied to the Islamic State group has opened in an Australian court, with prosecutors laying out graphic accusations of systematic abuse against a 15-year-old Yazidi girl who was held captive in Syria more than six years ago.
Thirty-one-year-old Zeinab Ahmad appeared at the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court this week, filing an application for bail while facing two counts of slavery-related crimes against humanity. Her bail hearing will resume Friday, after police laid out the full scope of the allegations before the court.
Zeinab and her 53-year-old mother Kawsar Ahmad — also known as Kawsar Abbas — have been held in Australian custody since last month. The pair returned to Australia from a Syrian refugee camp alongside a larger group of Australian women and children with confirmed ties to the Islamic State, after years spent living in territory controlled by the extremist group.
Detective Senior Constable Mark Clendenning, leading the case for police, told the court that the anonymous Iraqi-born Yazidi complainant, who was a minor when the abuse occurred, laid out years of mistreatment in a formal police statement. According to the statement, Zeinab’s father and Kawsar’s husband, Mohammed Ahmad, purchased the then-teen for $10,000 in 2017 in Raqqa, the de facto capital of the Islamic State’s self-declared caliphate at the time.
Clendenning told the court that Kawsar actively participated in purchasing the teen for enslavement — an unusual role for a woman within the extremist group’s hierarchical structure. He added that the entire Ahmad family held elevated status and privileges within the Islamic State that most other supporters did not access, granting them exceptions to the group’s standard internal practices.
Per the allegations laid out by Clendenning, the victim was brought into the family’s Raqqa home, where the couple lived with their five children, including Zeinab. The victim was assigned to share a bedroom with Zeinab, the court heard. Mohammed explicitly told the victim upon bringing her to the home that he had purchased her for two purposes: repeated sexual assault and unpaid domestic labor, even introducing her to the entire family with that explicit explanation.
Court documents further detail that Zeinab’s first husband, an Islamic State fighter, was killed in a 2016 drone strike, after which she remarried an Egyptian IS fighter who had lost a limb in combat.
Police have alleged that Zeinab was present on multiple occasions when her father abused the victim, including one incident where Mohammed beat the captive and dragged her by her hair down two flights of stairs inside the family home. Mohammed beat the victim two to three times every month for the entire duration of her captivity with the Ahmad family, Clendenning said, with all members of the family present during the assaults.
While Zeinab never physically harmed the victim, the complainant told police that Zeinab repeatedly issued violent threats against her and ordered her to complete endless domestic housework. The victim also stated that Mohammed sexually assaulted her “many times” despite consistent resistance from the captive.
After 16 months of captivity, Mohammed sold the victim to another IS member for the same $10,000 he had paid to acquire her, justifying the sale by claiming the teen was “bad” and refused to follow his orders. Mohammed is currently incarcerated in an Iraqi prison for his role in Islamic State-linked crimes.
The case unfolds against the long-documented historical context of the Islamic State’s systematic persecution of the Yazidi people, a small Kurdish-speaking ethno-religious minority primarily concentrated in Iraq, Syria and Turkey. The victim told investigators she was just 15 years old when she was captured as part of the IS’s mass enslavement campaign that trapped more than 6,800 Yazidi women and children. Over five years of captivity, she was traded between 17 different IS members before Kurdish forces liberated her from extremist control in 2019.
Court records show that three generations of the Ahmad family originally relocated from Melbourne to Syria via Turkey between 2013 and 2014, with Zeinab flying to the conflict zone to join the group with her first husband in 2014.
In opposing Zeinab’s bail application, Clendenning argued that releasing her from custody would create an unacceptable public safety risk. He noted that Zeinab has married multiple men with ties to the Islamic State, and her current husband, an Egyptian IS fighter, has an unknown current whereabouts. Critically, Clendenning added that Zeinab has never explicitly renounced the Islamic State or stated that she no longer supports the extremist group’s ideology following her surrender to Kurdish forces earlier this year.
If convicted on both charges of enslavement and the use of an enslaved person, Zeinab faces a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison for each count.