Process: Six and a half years in prison for IS returnees

The crimes of the Islamic State (IS) have long been known when a woman from Bad Oldesloe traveled to the territory of the terrorist militia in Syria with her 14-year-old son in the summer of 2016.

The German shares the Islamist views of her husband, who is ten years her senior and has already joined IS. The mother allows her son to be trained as a fighter. In February 2018 he died in a bomb attack. On Thursday, the State Protection Senate of the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court in Hamburg sentenced the woman to six and a half years in prison for membership in a terrorist organization abroad, war crimes, violation of the duty of care and education and negligent homicide.

At the age of 15, the defendant met her husband from the Palestinian territories and married him after they had a son together, as the presiding judge, Norbert Sakuth, explained. The family’s snack shop in Bad Oldesloe in Schleswig-Holstein went bankrupt in 2013. After that, the man became radicalized. In Ramadan 2015, as always during the month of fasting, he moved to a Lübeck mosque. A short time later he traveled to IS in Syria. His wife was desperate and wanted to follow him.

Although the Office for the Protection of the Constitution tried to stop her, she sold the furniture and car and applied for a passport for her younger son, who was born in 2002, using a forged signature from her husband. One day before his 14th birthday she flew to Turkey with him.

Paris 2015 attacks justified

Judge Sakuth said the boy was looking forward to seeing his father again and did not understand the implications of the decision. The mother, on the other hand, was quite aware that young people would be integrated into combat groups by IS. However, she shared the radical Islamic ideology of the terrorist organization. She justified the November 2015 attacks in Paris, in which Islamists shot 130 people, to her sister. For killing infidels, the assassins would go to heaven.

With the help of smugglers, the mother and son reached the north-west Syrian province of Idlib. The Islamist militia Jund al-Aqsa recruited the boy and took the accused to a “women’s shelter,” as Sakuth explained. The 14-year-old received weapons training and was deployed at militia checkpoints, among other places. He survived a helicopter attack and capture. Once he narrowly escaped an attack.

It was only in December 2016 that the accused was able to travel to the IS stronghold of Raqqa and met her husband. The son followed in 2017 and immediately began new ideological and military training with IS. By handing over the boy to the terrorist militia, the accused committed a war crime under the International Criminal Code, Sakuth explained.

Her older son was also released from custody in Germany at the same time. The mother had asked him to also travel to Syria and to bring as much money as possible. But it didn’t come to that. The young man wanted to take a plane to Greece without a passport, but had health problems before the plane took off.

In Raqqa, the accused ran the household for her husband, who worked as an IS official. When IS came under military pressure, the family fled with the terrorist militia towards the Iraqi border. The boy died in a bomb attack in a village on the Euphrates on February 23, 2018. The mother then spoke of a martyr’s death and said that that was her son’s dream.

The defense had stated that the defendant wanted to comfort himself. She wanted to believe that her child was now in a better place – but the State Protection Senate saw it differently. After two years in a Kurdish prison camp and a year in custody in Germany, the accused has still not distanced herself from Islamism. “She denies ever having been a radical,” said the judge. The 44-year-old court mitigated that she suffered from the death of her son and that she had admitted the negligent killing. The defendant accepted the verdict without any discernible emotion.