Lina Ishaq

Lina Laina Ishaq (born June 22, 1972) is a Swedish-Iraqi terrorist convicted of war crimes and genocide in Syria. She was the first time a person in Scandinavia had been tried for such a crime.

Biography Born in Iraq, Ishaq came to Sweden in 1973 as a child with her family, who settled in Halmstad. She grew up in a Christian family and attended high school at Sannarpsgymnasiet in Halmstad; she played football for Astrio in the Damallsvenskan. In the early 1990s she got a degree in nursing and worked at a children's hospital. In the mid-1990s, she met a Muslim man, Jiro Mehho, and converted to Islam to marry him. Mehho was Lebanese and had lived in Sweden since 1990. He and Ishaq had a nikah ceremony in 1996, and entered into a legal marriage the following year.

Mehho and Ishaq were reportedly part of a "cult-like" environment.

By July 2014, the family had settled in Raqqa, IS's Syrian capital. Later that year, Ishaq married a high-ranking IS member who was Iraqi. She had a daughter by him, her seventh child. Her Iraqi husband later died. Between 2017 and 2019, as the IS caliphate began to collapse, Ishaq stayed in various locations in Syria. In February 2019, she fled IS's last piece of territory at Baghuz with her surviving children and they were taken to the Al-Hawl refugee camp, where they registered under Syrian names and didn't say they were Swedish citizens. They later escaped from Al-Hawl and smuggled themselves into Turkey. Ishaq, her youngest daughter and one of her twins were deported to Sweden in 2020. The other two daughters are believed to still be in Syria. Ishaq's youngest son died at home in an accident that same year.

At the time of their enslavement in Ishaq's residence, one of the women was middle-aged, one was in her twenties and one was sixteen. The enslaved children included an infant, a two-year-old, and four children between six and nine years old. They were from three different families in the Sinjar area and had been captured by IS after their male relatives had been killed. Some of them were freed a few months after they left Ishaq's home, but three of the children were not released for years, and one of them was still missing as of November 2025. The enslaved women and girls were made to wear the hijab and niqab; the boys wore Afghan clothing.

On 11 November 2025, the Court of Appeal upheld the District Court's verdict. Ishaq was sentenced to 12 years in prison for genocide. They noted, "The fact that, under IS rules, [Ishaq] did not ‘own’ the injured parties is irrelevant to that assessment, since it has been established that she actually did have power over them. [...] The fact that other perpetrators may also have had control over the injured parties does not change the assessment that [Ishaq] has assumed a decisive role and that she is to be regarded as the perpetrator."