Sweden sentences mom over Syria move
STOCKHOLM — A southern Swedish court on Monday sentenced a woman to three years in prison for taking her 2-year-old son in 2014 to an area of Syria that was controlled by the Islamic State militant group.
The woman, who lived in the southern town of Landskrona, Sweden, told the child’s father that she and the boy were going on a holiday to Turkey. However, once in Turkey, the two crossed into Syria and Islamic State-run territory.
The Lund District Court said the woman, who was not named, took the child to an area “where there was war and an environment characterized by the violent ideology of the Islamic State group.”
The court, which did not identify the woman’s nationality, rejected her claims that she had only intended to go to Syria for a few days to see how it was there and then return home.
“She intended to move to Syria with her son and settle there permanently, and took her son away from his father in an arbitrary manner,” the court statement said.
In 2017, when the Islamic State’s reign began to collapse, the woman fled from Raqqa — the city that was known as the capital of the group’s so-called caliphate — and was captured by Syrian Kurdish troops, the Sydsvenska daily wrote. She managed to escape to Turkey, where she was arrested with her son and two other children she had given birth to in the meantime, with an Islamic State foreign fighter from Tunisia, the daily wrote. She was extradited from Turkey to Sweden.