Sharrouf – an Isis fighter who made international headlines in a photograph standing next to his young son holding a severed human head – is presumed to have died in 2017 in a US airstrike. The five women of Yazidi ethnicity at the centre of a protracted legal battle say they were victims of acts of violence in the Syrian city of Raqqa and northern Iraq in 2014. The women allege that they were “kept as slaves” in Sharrouf’s home, according to documents submitted to the New South Wales civil and administrative tribunal. The women say Sharrouf subjected them “to degrading treatment, physical and emotional threats, attempted rape, threats of being raped, threats of being killed, being hit with a cable and attempted hitting”, the tribunal documents show.