A Swedish woman abandoned her husband and went to the territory occupied by the Islamic extremist terrorist organization 'Islamic State' (IS) with her son, and was sentenced to prison. Photo by Yonhap News
[Asia Economy Reporter Kang Juhee] A Swedish woman abandoned her husband and went to the Islamic extremist terrorist organization 'Islamic State' (IS) territory with her 2-year-old son, eventually ending up in prison. The woman married an IS militant and gave birth to two daughters.
According to foreign media on the 8th (local time), in August 2014, a woman in her 30s, Ms. A, living in the southern Swedish port city of Landskrona, told her husband that she would "take a vacation in Turkey with our 2-year-old son" and set off on a trip, crossing into IS territory through Syria.
About three years later, in 2017, when the coalition forces attacked IS, Ms. A tried to flee from Raqqa, the IS capital in northern Syria, toward Turkey but was captured by Kurdish forces. At the time of her arrest, Ms. A was accompanied not only by her son whom she had brought from Sweden but also by two daughters born to an IS militant from Tunisia.
Investigations revealed that Ms. A, a Palestinian-Swedish national, married an IS militant within a month of arriving in IS territory and even announced this on her social networking service (SNS).
After arriving in Turkey, Ms. A was repatriated to Sweden, where the Swedish court sentenced her to three years in prison, judging that "considering various facts, Ms. A had no intention of returning to her original family and unilaterally took her son from her husband, exposing the child to the dangers of a war zone."
In court, Ms. A claimed, "I went to Syria just to see what the IS territory was like and planned to look around for only a few days," but the court did not accept this statement.
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