Former Swiss soldier Johan Cosar, photographed in Syria in 2015
GENEVA, Feb 23 (NNN-AGENCIES) — A Swiss military court has sentenced a former soldier for fighting against the Daesh group in Syria.
Johan Cosar used his military training to recruit hundreds of men to defend Christian groups from Daesh.
He was found guilty of undermining Switzerland’s neutrality and security by joining a foreign army – and given a three-month suspended sentence and fined 500 francs.
Cosar says he plans to appeal the sentence – which is relatively lenient when compared to the maximum of three years in prison.
He was born in Switzerland, and is a Swiss citizen. But his grandparents have Syrian roots, and the Cosar family are members of the Syriac Christian community.
After returning from Syria, he was arrested and charged under Switzerland’s military penal code, which forbids Swiss citizens from serving in foreign armies.
The verdict reflects similar sentences handed down to other Swiss men over the last 10 years, most of whom joined the French Foreign Legion.
At the outset of the trial, an army spokeswoman said: “The law forbids fighting for a foreign force. Who that force actually is, is irrelevant.”
Now 37, he says he originally travelled to Syria to work as a freelance journalist, but when he saw the Daesh group were advancing on Christian communities he felt he had no choice but to defend them.
He helped to found the Syriac Military Council, recruited for it, and readily shared the military skills he had learned in the Swiss army, among them weapons training and setting up checkpoints. At the height of the fighting, he was in charge of more than 500 men.
Dozens of Swiss citizens have travelled to Syria to fight for Daesh, or to marry the group’s soldiers. A few are already back and in prison.
Others are still in northern Syria, together with thousands of other foreign fighters, detained in camps run by Syrian opposition groups. Like countries across Europe, Switzerland is agonising over what to do about them.
Fighting for a banned group like Daesh carries a much stiffer prison sentence than the one facing Johan Cosar – up to 20 years. Switzerland’s justice minister said this week she would like Swiss foreign fighters to be tried “on the spot” in Syria rather than back in Switzerland.
The Swiss government is due to announce its policy on foreign fighters next week. — NNN-AGENCIES
