A Swedish court on Tuesday sentenced a 52-year-old woman to 12 years in prison on genocide charges, in the country's first court case over crimes committed by the Islamic State (IS) group against the Yazidi minority.
Accused of keeping Yazidi women and children as slaves at her home in Syria in the winter and spring of 2015, Lina Ishaq was convicted of "genocide" and "crimes against humanity," as well as war crimes, the court said in a statement.
The court in Stockholm said her crimes warranted a sentence of 16 years, but taking a previous sentence into account set the sentence to 12.
The woman, who is a Swedish citizen, was in jail having already been sentenced by a Swedish court to six years in prison in 2022 for allowing her 12-year-old son to be recruited as an IS child soldier.
The court said Tuesday's case concerned nine injured parties, six of whom were children at the time.
All the plaintiffs had been captured by IS in a series of attacks on Yazidi villages that began in August 2014 in Sinjar, Iraq, and their male relatives had been executed.
After about five months of captivity, they arrived at the convicted woman's home in Raqqa.
"The woman kept them imprisoned and treated them as her property by holding them as slaves for a period of, in most cases, five months," the court said.
- Forced conversion -
Their movement was restricted, they were made to perform chores and some had been photographed in preparation to be transferred to others.
"Given the fact that she participated in the onward transfer of the injured parties, she is also responsible for enabling their continued imprisonment and enslavement," the court said.
Ishaq also forced the plaintiffs to "become practising Muslims" by making them recite Koran verses and pray four or five times a day.
She also called the injured parties "demeaning invectives such as 'infidels' or 'slaves'", the court said.
The court stressed "that the comprehensive system of enslavement" was one of "the crucial elements" implemented by IS in "the perpetration of the genocide, the crimes against humanity and gross war crimes that the Yazidi population was subjected to".
As such, the court said "the woman shared the IS intent to destroy a religious group".
Mikael Westerlund, Lina Ishaq's lawyer, said his client had not yet decided whether to appeal, but said they were pleased that they court had not handed down a life sentence as requested by the prosecution.
"It was important for the prosecution to sentence her for life," he told AFP.
Around 300 Swedes or Swedish residents, a quarter of them women, joined IS in Syria and Iraq, mostly in 2013 and 2014, according to Sweden's intelligence service Sapo.
Ishaq grew up in a Christian Iraqi family in Sweden but converted to Islam after meeting her late husband and Islamist Jiro Mehho, with whom she had six children, in the mid-1990s.
She travelled to Syria with her children in 2013. Mehho died in August 2013, and Ishaq moved to Raqqa in 2014 and re-married.