A Swedish court on Tuesday sentenced a 52-year-old woman to 12 years in prison on genocide charges, in the country’s first court case over crimes by the Islamic State group against the Yazidi minority.
Accused of keeping Yazidi women and children as slaves at her home in Syria in 2015, Lina Ishaq was convicted of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, the Stockholm district court said in a statement.
The crimes warranted a sentence of 16 years, but taking a previous sentence into account it ordered her to spend 12 years behind bars, the court said. Prosecutors had demanded a life jail sentence.
The woman, a Swedish citizen, had already been sentenced to six years imprisonment in 2022 for allowing her 12-year-old son to be recruited as an IS child soldier.
Prosecutor Reena Devgun said she was happy with the convictions but she would likely appeal against the sentence.
“These are very, very severe crimes, and compared to other Swedish jurisprudence or Swedish sentencing traditions, I do think that there is room for a more severe sentence,” she told AFP.
The court said the case concerned nine Yazidi, six of whom were children at the time.
All the plaintiffs were captured by IS in attacks on Kurdish-speaking Yazidi villages that began in August 2014 in Sinjar, Iraq. Their male relatives were executed and thousands of women were taken.
After about five months of captivity, they arrived at Ishaq’s home in Raqqa.
“The woman kept them imprisoned and treated them as her property by holding them as slaves for a period of, in most cases, five months,” the court said.
Their movement was restricted, they were made to perform chores and some were photographed in preparation to be transferred to other people as slaves.
“Given the fact that she participated in the onward transfer of the injured parties, she is also responsible for enabling their continued imprisonment and enslavement,” the court said.
Ishaq also forced the Yazidis, who practice their own religion, to “become practising Muslims” by making them recite Koran verses and pray four or five times a day.
She also called the injured parties “demeaning invectives such as ‘infidels’ or ‘slaves'”, the court said.
The court stressed “that the comprehensive system of enslavement” was one of “the crucial elements” implemented by IS in “the perpetration of the genocide, the crimes against humanity and gross war crimes that the Yazidi population was subjected to”.
As such, the court said “the woman shared the IS intent to destroy a religious group”.
Ishaq’s lawyer Mikael Westerlund said the woman had not decided whether to appeal, but said they were pleased the court had not handed down a life sentence as requested by the prosecution.
“It was important for the prosecution to sentence her for life,” he told AFP.
Around 300 Swedes or Swedish residents, a quarter of them women, joined IS in Syria and Iraq, mostly in 2013 and 2014, according to Sweden’s intelligence service Sapo.
Ishaq grew up in a Christian Iraqi family in Sweden but converted to Islam after meeting her late husband and Islamist Jiro Mehho, with whom she had six children, in the 1990s.
She travelled to Syria with her children in 2013. Mehho died in August 2013, and Ishaq moved to Raqqa in 2014 and re-married.
