A Dutch court on Thursday sentenced four women who were returned by the government last year from a refugee camp in Syria to prison terms of up to three years after convicting them of terrorism.

In February 2022, five women and 11 children arrived in the Netherlands after the government returned them from the al-Roj camp in northeastern Syria, where families of jihadist fighters are being held.

Shortly after their return, the five women appeared before a court in Rotterdam, where they were charged with joining fighters in the Islamic State at the height of the Syrian civil war, and planning terrorist acts.

On Thursday, the Rotterdam Court said in a statement that the women on Thursday "went to battlefields in Syria and Iraq, knowing that there is a war going on."

"There, the women joined the Islamic State," the statement added, in which their husbands were active.

The sentences imposed on the four women ranged from 30 to 36 months of imprisonment, of which 12 to 15 months were suspended.

In its statement, the court affirmed that the four convicts "expressly renounce the ideology of the Islamic State."

The court acquitted the fifth woman of the terrorism charge, but sentenced her to 16 months in prison, nine of which were suspended, for "endangering her child by traveling to a conflict zone."

About 300 Dutch jihadists have traveled to Syria to join radical Islamist fighters since 2012, according to Dutch government figures.

Dutch intelligence said that about 100 people are still there, and a large number of them are in camps and detention centers in northern Syria, Iraq and Turkey, while about 100 others have died.