A Swedish court has sentenced a woman to 12 years in prison on genocide charges – in the country’s first criminal case over Islamic State’s persecution of Yazidis.
Lina Ishaq was also convicted of crimes against humanity and war crimes after being found guilty of keeping Yazidi women and children as slaves at her home in Syria in 2015, Stockholm’s district court said in a statement on Tuesday.
The 52-year-old, who is a Swedish citizen, is already serving a six-year sentence handed down in 2022 for allowing her 12-year-old son to be recruited as an IS child soldier.
Prosecutor Reena Devgun, who had demanded a life sentence, said she was happy with the convictions but would probably launch an appeal against the prison term.
“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 news agency AFP.
The court said the case concerned nine Yazidis, six of whom were children at the time.
All the plaintiffs were captured by IS during attacks on Kurdish-speaking Yazidi villages that began in August 2014 in Sinjar, Iraq. They were among thousands of women taken captive, while their male relatives were executed.
After about five months of captivity, they arrived at Ishaq’s home in Raqqa, Syria.
Victims ‘imprisoned and enslaved’
“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 statement added.
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 statement said.