STOCKHOLM (AP) – A southern Swedish court on Monday sentenced a woman to three years in prison for taking her 2-year-old son to Syria in 2014, in an area that was then controlled by the Islamic State group.
The woman, who lived in the southern city of Landskrona, reportedly told the child’s father that she and the boy were only going on holiday to Turkey. However, once in Turkey, the two crossed over to Syria and ISIS-controlled territory.
The Lund District Court said the woman, who was not identified, 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, dismissed her claims that she only intended to go to Syria for a few days to see how she was doing and then return home. She also told the court that she became interested in religion after the death of a close relative.
“She intended to move to Syria with her son and settle there permanently, and took her father’s son arbitrarily,” the court said.
In 2017, when the Islamic State’s reign began to collapse, it fled Raqqa – the city that was known as the capital of ISIS’s so-called “caliphate” – and was captured by Syrian Kurdish troops, wrote the daily Sydsvenska. She managed to escape to Turkey, where she was arrested with her son and two other children she had given birth to, with a foreign fighter from IS from Tunisia, wrote the diary. She was extradited from Turkey to Sweden.