A 52-year-old woman in Sweden has been sentenced to 12 years in prison for torture and mistreatment of Yazidi slaves. She joined the terrorist group ISIS in Syria, where she held around ten women and children from the Yazidi ethnic and religious minority in captivity.
According to SVT, Lina Ishak from the town of Halmstad was drawn to the ideology of ISIS and went to Syria with her family in 2013. There, she came into possession of three adult women and six minors from the Yazidi minority. In her home in Raqqa, she forced the women to perform Muslim rituals, used them for hard labor without rights, and sometimes lent them to acquaintances, where they were subjected to violence and humiliation. She also showed them ISIS propaganda materials, including videos of the executions of other Yazidis.
Ishak was found guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and complicity in genocide. The court sentenced her to 12 years in prison and ordered her to pay compensation to the victims. Aggravating factors included her ideological motivation, the duration of the crime (about five months), and the severe consequences for the victims.
This sentence is the second for Ishak: in a previous case, she was already found guilty of war crimes. Based on the sentence, her prison term was reduced to 12 years. In January, two sisters who had also joined ISIS were sentenced in Norway, and in the Netherlands, a trial began in the fall of 2024 for a woman who used slave labor in Syria.
