COPENHAGEN, Denmark — A 52-year-old woman associated with the Islamic State group went on trial on Monday in Sweden on charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes against Yazidi women and children in Syria.
Lina Laina Ishaq, who is a Swedish citizen, is accused of committing the crimes during the period from August 2014 to December 2016 in the Syrian city of Raqqa, which at the time was the seat of the militant group’s self-proclaimed caliphate and home to about 300,000 people.
The trial marks the first time that IS attacks against the Yazidis, one of Iraq’s oldest religious minorities, have been tried in Sweden. The hearings are expected to last about two months, most of them behind closed doors.
The crimes took place under IS rule in Raqqa, where Ishaq was living at the time.
Under IS rule, Yazidi women and children were “regarded as property and subjected to being traded as slaves, sexual slavery, forced labor, deprivation of liberty and extrajudicial executions,” prosecutor Reena Devgun said when the charges were made public last month.
The prosecution says that at her home in Raqqa, Ishaq abused Yazidis with the aim to ”completely or partially annihilate the Yazidi ethnic group,” Devgun said as the trial opened at the Stockholm District Court, the Swedish TT news agency said.
The charge sheet, obtained by The Associated Press, says Ishaq is suspected of holding nine people, including children, for up to seven months, treated them as slaves and also abused several of those she held captive.
Ishaq, who denies wrongdoing, is also accused of having molested a baby, said to have been 1 month old at the time, by holding a hand over the child’s mouth when he screamed to silence him. She is also suspected of having sold people to IS, knowing they risked being killed or subjected to serious sexual abuse.
The Islamic State group abducted Yazidi women and children and brought them to Syria in 2014, when IS militants stormed Yazidi towns and villages in Iraq’s Sinjar region. Women were forced into sexual slavery, and boys were taken to be indoctrinated in jihadi ideology.
Three years later, when the Islamic State’s reign began to collapse, Ishaq fled from 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 IS foreign fighter from Tunisia. She was later extradited to Sweden.
Ishaq was earlier convicted in Sweden and sentenced to three years in prison for taking her 2-year-old son to Syria in 2014, to an area then controlled by IS. She had claimed that at the time, she had told the child’s father that she and the boy were only going on a holiday to Turkey. However, once in Turkey, the two crossed into Syria and into IS-run territory.
Ishaq who already is in prison, was identified through information from a U.N. team investigating atrocities in Iraq, known as UNITAD.