She is accused of bringing her son to the Islamic State terrorist group to be deployed as a child soldier in Syria. A woman will soon go on trial in Sweden for serious war crimes and violating international law, the prosecution was quoted as saying in Le Figaro newspaper on Tuesday January the 4th. Specifically, the 49-year-old woman, who went to Syria in 2013 – and whose nationality was not given – is accused of facilitating the recruitment and subsequent deployment of her then 12-year-old son as a child soldier. According to the prosecutor’s office, this is the first charge in Sweden of war crimes related to the deployment of a child soldier.
The woman “is suspected of having ensured that her son was recruited and continuously deployed in Syria between August 1, 2013 and May 27, 2016, when he was 15 years old, to participate directly in combat operations carried out by armed groups, including the Islamic State terrorist organisation,” the prosecution said in a statement published by Le Figaro.As for the child, he died in 2017 in undisclosed circumstances. According to the investigation, “the son was brought up and trained to take part in hostilities, he was provided with military equipment and weapons, and he was used in combat and for propaganda purposes and other tasks that were part of the combat operations,” prosecutor Reena Devgun later said.The child’s mother, who returned to Sweden in 2020, denies the allegations, according to the local press quoted. On the occasion of her departure for Syria, the accused had taken her five children with her.