Swedish authorities have filed charges against a 52-year-old woman connected to the Islamic State group for genocide, crimes against humanity, and serious war crimes against Yazidi women and children in Syria. The woman, identified as Lina Laina Ishaq, who holds Swedish citizenship, is accused of committing these crimes in Raqqa between August 2014 and December 2016 when the city was the self-proclaimed IS caliphate’s de facto capital.
Senior prosecutor Reena Devgun highlighted that the crimes occurred under IS rule in Raqqa and marked the first instance of IS attacks against the Yazidi minority being prosecuted in Sweden. She described how women, children, and men were treated as property, being traded as slaves, forced into sexual slavery, subjected to forced labor, deprived of liberty, and faced extrajudicial executions.
Devgun revealed that they were able to link the woman to the crimes through information provided by UNITAD, the U.N. team investigating atrocities in Iraq. The prosecutor alleged that Ishaq held a group of Yazidi women and children captive in her residence in Raqqa, subjecting them to severe suffering, torture, and other inhumane treatments. The charge sheet mentioned that she held nine individuals, including children, as slaves in her home for up to seven months and mistreated them.
The charges included allegations that Ishaq molested a one-month-old baby by covering the child’s mouth to silence him. Furthermore, she is suspected of selling individuals to IS, aware that they faced potential death or severe sexual abuse. In a prior case, the woman was convicted in Sweden for taking her 2-year-old son to Syria in 2014, where she had claimed to his father that they were going on holiday to Turkey but crossed the border into IS-run territory.
After IS’s decline in 2017, she fled Raqqa and was later captured by Syrian Kurdish forces before escaping to Turkey, where she was arrested with her son and two other children. She was then extradited to Sweden. The trial for these crimes is scheduled to commence on October 7 and is expected to last two months, with parts of the proceedings to be conducted in private.
