The German mother of a teenager killed in fighting in Syria is to be jailed for seven and a half years, according to the Federal Prosecutor’s Office. The 44-year-old from Bad Oldesloe was guilty of two counts of membership in a terrorist organisation abroad, representatives of the prosecution told the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court in Hamburg on Wednesday. She had first joined the Islamist militia Jund al-Aqsa in 2016 and then the Islamic State (IS) in Syria.
The accused had handed over her son, who was only 14 years old at the time, to the militias as a child soldier. In doing so, she committed a war crime under the International Criminal Code. She had also violated her duty of care and education by taking her son to a civil war zone. The boy had actively participated in fighting and had been in acute danger of his life on several occasions. On February 23, 2018, the boy, who was 15 years old by then, had been killed in a rocket attack. She had brought the boy into the IS territory, which is why the accused should also be convicted of involuntary manslaughter.
The father of the family – a native of Palestine – is said to have joined IS in Syria as a fighter as early as 2015. The parents had surrendered to Kurdish forces near the Iraqi border in February 2019. The man was sent to prison, the woman to a camp, from which she managed to escape to Turkey at the turn of 2020/21, according to the federal prosecutor’s office. On her return to Germany, she was arrested at the airport in Berlin on March 24 last year.
The accused had tried to present herself as a naïve wife who had only followed her husband, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office explained. He allegedly ran a falafel stand in Syria and was seriously injured in an attack. The accused had wanted to come to his aid. The representatives of the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office considered this explanation not credible.
In fact, the violent tendencies of the couple from 2013 onwards had also come from her. According to a witness, after the IS attacks in Paris in 2015, she had said that the victims deserved to die. She had told her son that it was important to humiliate and hate the infidels. From Syria, she had urged her older son in Germany to also come to the IS camp. He should be happy about the “martyrdom” of his younger brother. Even after the military defeat of the terrorist militia, she defended the Islamic State in a telephone conversation with her sister in 2020.
The Office of the Attorney General considered her personal details to be credible. According to this, she had grown up in Bad Oldesloe together with a sister and had completed secondary school. At the age of 15, she met her husband, converted to Islam and married. In 2015, her husband was sentenced to a one-year prison term in Germany and then left for Syria without telling his wife.
https://www.ln-online.de/Lokales/Stormarn/Oldesloer-IS-Rueckkehrerin-Lange-Haftstrafe-gefordert
But what is to be done with daughters?