A 49-year-old woman has been convicted of war crimes and violations of international law, Le Figaro reports. On Friday March 4, the Swedish woman, who had joined the Islamic State (IS) organisation in Syria, was sentenced to six years in prison. She was accused of having her son, aged 12 to 15, recruited as a child soldier for the jihadist group. This was announced by the court in Stockholm in a press release.
Specifically, the teenager, named Joan, had died in the conflict as a 16-year-old in 2017, as we had reported in an earlier article. However, his mother had “not acted appropriately to prevent the boy’s recruitment”, “nor did she want to prevent it, his role as a child soldier was in line with her religious beliefs”, the court stated, whose remarks were quoted by the newspaper.
It was the first time that a case of the recruitment of a child soldier, i.e. – according to Swedish law – a child younger than 15, was tried in the Nordic country. Most Swedes or Swedish residents who have joined IS – their total number is estimated at around 300 – cannot be prosecuted for their mere association with the jihadist organisation. This is because the Swedish law criminalising this crime was only passed after the wave of departures to Syria, the national newspaper reminds us. In this way, convictions remain rare when other charges can be investigated. The first “returnee” of the terrorist organisation convicted in Sweden was sentenced in March 2021 for taking her son to the Levant.