Swedish authorities have charged a 52-year-old woman associated with the Islamic State group with genocide, crimes against humanity, and serious war crimes against Yazidi women and children in Syria. This marks the first such case of a person to be tried in Sweden.
The woman, a Swedish citizen named Lina Laina Ishaq, allegedly committed the crimes from August 2014 to December 2016 in Raqqa, the former de facto capital of the self-proclaimed IS caliphate. The crimes occurred under IS rule in Raqqa, with the prosecutor claiming that the woman detained Yazidi women and children in her residence and subjected them to severe suffering, torture, and other inhumane treatment.
The indictment states that the aim of these actions was to annihilate the Yazidi ethnic group and were part of an armed conflict. In 2014, IS militants abducted women and children from Yazidi towns and villages in Iraq's Sinjar region, forcing women into sexual slavery and indoctrinating boys in jihadi ideology.
The woman had previously been convicted in Sweden for taking her 2-year-old son to Syria in 2014, claiming it was a holiday trip to Turkey. She was captured by Syrian Kurdish troops in 2017 as the Islamic State's reign began to collapse and later extradited to Sweden.
The trial is scheduled to start on October 7 and is expected to last approximately two months, with large parts of the proceedings to be held behind closed doors.
