A Swedish woman has been sentenced to 12 years in prison for committing crimes against Yazidi women and children in Syria while she was a member of Islamic State.
A Swedish woman has been sentenced to 12 years in prison for committing “genocide, crimes against humanity and serious war crimes” towards Yazidi people in Syria after she had joined the terror group Islamic State (IS).
The 52-year-old Swedish citizen Lina Ishaq was found guilty of enslaving three women and six children for months. She also physically abused them and forced them to practice Islam.
She was convicted of “genocide, crimes against humanity and serious war crimes”, a Swedish court said on Tuesday. She was already serving a 6-year sentence for taking her then 12-year-old son to Syria and allowing him to be recruited as an IS soldier. He died in battle aged 16.
Ishaq is accused of committing the crimes during the period from August 2014 to December 2016 in the Syrian city of Raqqa, which at the time was the seat of the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate and home to about 300,000 people.
She joined the terror group in 2013, along with 300 other Swedish nationals, most of them women, according to the country’s intelligence service.
The trial marks the first time that IS attacks against the Yazidis, one of Iraq’s oldest religious minorities, have been tried in Sweden.
IS abducted Yazidi women and children and brought them to Syria in 2014, when its militants stormed Yazidi towns and villages in Iraq’s Sinjar region. Women were forced into sexual slavery and boys were taken to be indoctrinated in jihadi ideology.
Around 5,000 Yazidis were killed and over 400,000 people displaced. There are crrently around 6,000 Yazidis in Sweden.
Three years later, when the Islamic State’s reign began to collapse, Ishaq fled from Raqqa and was captured by Syrian Kurdish troops.
She managed to reach Turkey, where she was arrested with her son and two other children she had given birth to in the meantime with an IS foreign fighter from Tunisia. She extradited to Sweden in 2020.
