Woman who kept slaves for ISIS in Syria jailed

A woman who kept prisoners captured by ISIS as “slaves” in the period of Syria’s civil war has been jailed for 12 years in a trial of war crimes in Sweden, The National reported on February 11th.

Lina Ishaq, 52, was sentenced in the country’s first court case relating to ISIS’s assault against the Yazidi community in Syria and Iraq, during 2014 to 2016.

Ishaq, a Swedish citizen, was found guilty for keeping women and children as captives in her home after ISIS had launched an attack on their villages and killed their male family members, according to a court in Stockholm. The judges said that Ishaq shared ISIS’s inclination to oppress the Yazidi people and “had a strong ideological intent to destroy a religious group.”

The court said she forced the groups of females and minors into practicing Islam and made them face “various forms of abuse” while calling them “infidels” and “slaves.” The investigation found that Ishaq imprisoned seven children and two were women. Of the children, three were not freed for several years. One child is still missing.

Ishaq was extradited from Turkey in 2021. The Stockholm District Court said the nine people she enslaved “were subjected by the convicted woman to serious mental harm which will affect them for the rest of their lives.”

Ishaq was also convicted of “crimes against humanity and gross war crimes.” The group were forced to watch propaganda films that showed Yazidis being killed by ISIS and were told that the terrorist group would “kill all the infidels”.

The captor also forced its victims “to become practicing Muslims,” to pray five times each day and were forbidden from speaking a Kurdish dialect, Kurmanji. The Swedish court also said that she “kept them imprisoned and treated them as her property by holding them as slaves.”

“The crimes do not only constitute an exceptionally serious violation of the life and integrity of specific individuals, but also of fundamental human values and humanity,” the court said. “To exercise the powers attaching to right of ownership over another human being is a tremendous violation of the integrity of that person, as it deprives the person of their human dignity.”

The National