ERBIL, Kurdistan Region of Iraq - A Swedish court on Tuesday sentenced a woman to 12 years in prison on charges of genocide after being accused of keeping Yazidi women and children as slaves at her home in Syria in 2015, during the brutal reign of the Islamic State (ISIS). 

The court said that the case involved nine injured parties, six of whom were children at the time of the crime, adding the woman, a Swedish citizen by the name of Lina Ishaq “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 detailed that the 52-year-old woman’s crimes warranted a 16-year sentence, but the sentence was reduced by four years after taking into account a previous sentence where the woman was already serving time after having been sentenced to six years in 2022 for allowing her 12-year-old child to be recruited by ISIS.

Following an ISIS attack on Iraq’s Sinjar in August 2014, thousands of Yazidis were forced to flee their homes in hopes of escaping the militant group’s atrocities.

According to data shared by Hussein Qaidi, head of the Yazidi rescue office in the Kurdistan Region, a total of 6,417 Yazidi children and women were captured by ISIS in their August 2014 attack on Sinjar.

While the group took the Yazidi women and children, the Yazidi men in Sinjar were mass murdered at the hands of the terror group.

The court stressed "that the comprehensive system of enslavement" was one of "the crucial elements" implemented by ISIS in "the perpetration of the genocide, the crimes against humanity and gross war crimes that the Yazidi population was subjected to."

Therefore, the court said, "the woman shared the ISIS intent to destroy a religious group".

Around 300 Swedish citizens, a quarter of them women, joined ISIS after the group gained its notoriety, mostly in 2013 and 2014, according to the Swedish intelligence service Sapo.