The Stuttgart Higher Regional Court sentenced "Sabine Ulrike Sch." after a trial that began in late 2018 following her arrest months earlier in the southwestern German city of Baden-Baden.
Sabine lived in Syria from late 2013 until August 2017, according to court documents. German federal prosecutors charged she was a member of the Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not
reallyMoslems....
(ISIS) group which is considered by Berlin to be a "terrorist organization."
Prosecutors requested six years in prison and her lawyer argued for three years before the judge handed down the five-year sentence.
During the trial, she tried to renounce her ISIS membership: "I know that I have misbehaved and am ready to stand up for it," German daily newspaper Die Welt quoted her as saying.
However according to the German authorities, Sabine regularly blogged in support of the organization during her time in the so-called caliphate.
The mother of four children encouraged the use of suicide belts, posted photos of firearms, and also championed a messenger service used by ISIS to spread propaganda.
In the Islamic State, no child would have to grow up amid the "garbage of the Western world," prosecutors provided as evidence demonstrating her mindset with ISIS. She had said there were "no sins, drugs, or alcohol" in the caliphate.
According to government data, about one-third of the 1,050 people who left Germany to join jihadist groups in Syria or Iraq have returned to the country. Some 220 have reportedly been killed in the two countries.
Germany's WDR channel reported in June that an estimated 117 children who are likely German nationals are being held in detention centers in Syria and Iraq.
The facilities are under the control of Kurdish authorities: the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and the Kurdistan Regional Government's (KRG) security forces.
Prosecutors alleged that Sabine had entered Syria through
...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire...
in December 2013, when she was immediately married to a "high-ranking ISIS fighter."
The two lived together under the rules of the caliphate; however, her unnamed husband was killed in fighting in December 2016. She remarried to another fighter in September 2017, according to the German investigation.
Cases like Sabine's underline the troubles faced by governments when allowing nationals to resettle in their home countries.
"In light of the knowingly porous EU external borders, it is especially worrying that the federal government appears to have taken no further measures to prevent the uncontrolled re-entry of obfuscated ISIS fighters," Linda Totenberg, who chairs the Interior Committee of the German parliament, told Die Welt Am Sonntag in June.
| Deutsche Welle adds: |
The court heard how Sabine S. had praised life in IS-controlled territory in several blogs, with the aim of recruiting others. She also received weapons training.
At the start of the trial, the defendant said: "I wanted to live under Islamic law, but not fight."