Swedish authorities today charged a 52-year-old woman associated with the Islamic State (IS) group with genocide, crimes against humanity and serious war crimes against Yazidi women and children in Syria.
Lina Laina Ishaq, who is a Swedish citizen, is believed to have committed the crimes between August 2014 and December 2016 in Raqqa, where around 300,000 people live.
Raqqa was the 'de facto' capital of the self-proclaimed caliphate of IS (also known by its Arabic acronym Daesh).
The crimes "occurred under IS rule in Raqqa and this is the first time that IS attacks against the Yazidi minority have been tried in Sweden," said prosecutor Reena Devgun in a statement quoted by the US news agency AP.
“Women, children and men were considered property and subjected to trade as slaves, sexual slavery, forced labour, deprivation of liberty and extrajudicial executions,” Devgun said.
Announcing the charges at a press conference, Devgun said the woman was identified through information from UNITAD, the UN team investigating atrocities in Iraq.
“IS sought to annihilate the Yazidi ethnic group on an industrial scale,” the prosecutor said.
In a separate statement, the Stockholm District Court said the prosecutor alleges that the defendant detained several women and children belonging to the Yazidi ethnic group at her residence in Raqqa.
“Allegedly, exposing them, among other things, to severe suffering, torture or other inhuman treatment, as well as persecution, depriving them of fundamental rights on cultural, religious and gender grounds, contrary to general international law,” it said.
According to the indictment, obtained by the AP, Ishaq is suspected of holding nine people, including children, in her home in Raqqa for about seven months and treating them as slaves.
She also abused several of the people she held captive.
The indictment says Ishaq, who denies any wrongdoing, is accused of molesting a baby, who was then 1 month old, by placing her hand over the child’s mouth when she screamed for him to be quiet.
She is also suspected of selling people to ISIS, knowing they would be killed or subjected to severe sexual abuse.
In 2014, ISIS militants raided Yazidi towns and villages in the Sinjar region of Iraq and abducted women and children.
The women were forced into sexual slavery, and the boys were taken away to be indoctrinated in jihadist ideology.
Lina Laina Ishaq had already been sentenced in Sweden to three years in prison for taking her two-year-old son to Syria in 2014, to an area then controlled by IS.
In 2017, as IS's rule began to crumble, Lina Laina Ishaq fled Raqqa and was captured by Syrian Kurdish troops.
She managed to escape to Turkey, where she was detained with her son and two other children she had given birth to with a foreign IS fighter from Tunisia.
She was extradited from Turkey to Sweden.
Before her conviction in 2021, the woman lived in the southern Swedish city of Landskrona.
The court said the trial is expected to start on October 7 and last approximately two months.
Much of the trial is expected to take place behind closed doors.
The Yazidis are a Kurdish ethno-religious community present mainly in northern Iraq, southeastern Turkey, northern Syria, the Caucasus and parts of Iran.
