A Swedish court found a Swedish woman guilty of war crimes for failing to prevent her 12-year-old son from becoming a child soldier in Syria, where he was killed in the civil war.
The woman has denied the charges.
“The district court sentences Lina Ishaq to six years in prison for grave violation of international law and grave war crime,” the Stockholm district court said on Friday.
“She, in her capacity as protection guarantor, omitted to prevent her son Joan, 12-15 years, from being recruited by unknown accomplices and used as child soldier on behalf of ISIS in the armed conflict in Syria,” it said in the verdict.
The 49-year-old woman, a Swede who returned from Syria in 2020, is the first person known to have been charged in Sweden with aiding the recruitment of her own minor son as a child soldier.
The boy, born in 2001, died in 2017.
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The woman and her husband had been part of a "cult-like" Islamist environment and in April 2013 she brought her son to join his father and an older son in Syria.
Around 300 Swedes or Swedish residents, a quarter of whom are women, joined IS in Syria and Iraq, mostly in 2013 and 2014, according to the Sapo intelligence service.
Sweden did not have existing legislation at the time to prosecute people for membership in a terrorist organization, so prosecutors instead sought other crimes with which to charge returnees. 
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