The 52-year-old gets 12 years in jail for ‘genocide, crimes against humanity and serious war crimes’ by ISIL in 2015.
A Swedish court has sentenced a woman to 12 years in prison on genocide charges for keeping Yazidi women and children as slaves at her home in Syria, in the country’s first court case over crimes committed by the ISIL (ISIS) group against the minority.
The 52-year-old Swedish citizen, Lina Ishaq, was convicted of “genocide, crimes against humanity and serious war crimes” in 2015, the court said on Tuesday in a statement. It noted that her actions were part of a broader ISIL campaign against the Kurdish-speaking Yazidi minority.
For centuries, the Yazidis have been persecuted for their religious beliefs by the Ottomans, Arabs and most recently, in a brutal campaign of death and sexual slavery by ISIL.
The Swedish court said this specific case mainly concerned nine injured parties, six of whom were children at the time.
“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, adding that their movement was restricted and they were made to perform chores and some had been photographed in preparation to be transferred to others.
The court stressed “that the comprehensive system of enslavement” was one of “the crucial elements” implemented by ISIL in crimes against people from the Yazidi community and in turn, her crimes warranted a sentence of 16 years. But taking a previous sentence into account, the court set the sentence to 12 years.
The woman is already in jail for having been sentenced by a Swedish court to six years in prison in 2022 for allowing her 12-year-old son to be recruited as a child soldier for ISIL.
‘Drop in the ocean’
Reporting from Stockholm, Al Jazeera’s Paul Rhys said Ishaq grew up in an Iraqi Christian family before she converted to Islam and one of her sons was an ISIL child soldier who was killed in battle.
“This sentence for 12 years [for Ishaq], is just a drop in the ocean of the justice the Yazidis are hoping for. Thousands are still missing and countless bodies are still trying to be identified by the authorities in Iraq,” he added.
About 300 Swedish residents, a quarter of them women, joined ISIL in Syria and Iraq, mostly in 2013 and 2014, according to the country’s intelligence service Sapo.
Sweden did not have existing legislation at the time to prosecute people for membership in an armed organisation, so prosecutors instead sought other crimes with which to charge returnees.
Under Swedish law, courts can try people for crimes against international law committed abroad.
According to the United Nations, recruiting and using children below the age of 15 as soldiers is banned under international humanitarian law and recognised as a war crime by the International Criminal Court.