BY: V4 Agency
A woman travelled to Syria with her five children to join the Islamic State. Recently, she returned two Sweden with two daughters, but she was detained and accused by authorities of committing war crimes and forcing one of her daughters into early marriage.
The 48-year-old woman returned from Syria to Sweden with her two daughters, aged 14 and 3, in mid-December. Halmstad’s social welfare service decided to take the girls into state care immediately for fear that their mother would leave Sweden again to return, with her daughters, to the Islamic State.
The mother first travelled to Syria in 2013 with her five children and her then husband, Abu Omar al Kurdi, who moved to Sweden in 1990. He operated a violent Salafist website and was known at the mosque in Halmstad, where he sometimes preached. He died in Syria in 2013 fighting for the Islamic State. The woman remarried and gave birth to her daughter, now aged 3. Her second husband also died in battle. Documents obtained by the court reveal that two of her elder daughters now live in Idlib, but several of her children have died.
She claimed that her family “lived a normal life” in Syria. However, according the expert assessment, the children “have experienced a series of traumatic events in Syria”. For instance, the 14-year-old girl lost her father and her siblings in the war. Moreover, authorities have also found out that the mother had forced her daughter into early marriage when she was only 12.
Images obtained by SVT show two of her sons posing with weapons and mutilated human bodies. The boys are also believed to have lost their lives during battle when they were 14 and 18.
Their mother is currently in custody and authorities have launched an investigation against her on suspicion of forcing her daugher into an early marriage and committing war crimes, although she denies all the accusations.