Swedish woman charged over ISIS torture of Yazidi women and children in Syria

Lina Laina Ishaq accused of crimes of humanity and inhumane treatment

Syrians inspect debris after a bomb hit a building during clashes between rebel fighters and Syrian government forces on August 10, 2013 in the northern city of Raqqa. AFP

A 52-year-old woman in Sweden was on Thursday charged over her association with ISIS, genocide, crimes against humanity and serious war crimes against Yazidi women and children in Syria, in the first such trial in the Scandinavian country.

Swedish citizen Lina Laina Ishaq is accused of committing the crimes between August 2014 and December 2016, in the city of Raqqa, the former de facto capital of ISIS's self-proclaimed caliphate and home to about 300,000 people.

Senior prosecutor Reena Devgun said the crimes “took place under ISIS rule in Raqqa, and this is the first time that ISIS attacks against the Yazidi minority have been tried in Sweden”. The Yazidis are one of Iraq’s oldest religious minorities.

Iraq's Yazidis wait for ISIS-abducted relatives to return - in pictures

“Women, children and men were regarded as property and subjected to being traded as slaves, sexual slavery, forced labour, deprivation of liberty and extrajudicial executions,” Ms Devgun said. “ISIS tried to annihilate the Yazidi ethnic group on an industrial scale."

In announcing the charges, Ms Devgun said prosecutors were able to identify Ishaq through information from the UN team investigating atrocities in Iraq, known as Unitad.

The Stockholm District Court said the prosecution claims she detained a number of women and children of the Yazidi ethnic group in her residence in Raqqa, and “allegedly exposed them to, among other things, severe suffering, torture or other inhumane treatment" and deprived them "of fundamental rights for cultural, religious and gender reasons contrary to general international law”.

Militias who played a vital role in defeating ISIS - in pictures

Ishaq is accused of holding nine people, including children, in her home for up to seven months and treating them as slaves, and abusing some of them.

Ishaq, who denies wrongdoing, is further accused of having molested a baby, said to have been one month old at the time, by holding a hand over the child’s mouth when he screamed to silence him. She is also accused of having sold people to ISIS knowing they risked being killed or subjected to serious sexual abuse.

“In short, her explanation is that she has never bought another person, that she has never owned or exercised any control over another person and that she has never sold another person,” Ishaq's lawyer Mikael Westerlund told Swedish news agency TT.

In 2014, ISIS militants stormed Yazidi towns and villages in Iraq’s Sinjar region and abducted women and children. Women were forced into sexual slavery and boys were taken to be indoctrinated.

Iraqi artist depicts Yazidi heritage - in pictures

The court said Ishaq's trial was to start on October 7 and would last approximately two months. Much of it will be held behind closed doors.

Ishaq was earlier convicted in Sweden and sentenced to three years in prison for taking her two-year-old son to Syria in 2014, to an area then controlled by ISIS.

She had claimed that at the time, she had told the child’s father that she and the boy were going on holiday to Turkey. However, once in Turkey, the two crossed into ISIS-run territory in Syria.

In 2017, when ISIS’s reign began to collapse, Ishaq fled Raqqa and was captured by Syrian-Kurdish troops. She managed to escape to Turkey where she was arrested with her son and two other children she had given birth to in the meantime, with an ISIS foreign fighter from Tunisia.

She was extradited from Turkey to Sweden. During her first trial and conviction in 2021, Ishaq was not identified by name. She previously lived in the southern Swedish town of Landskrona.