Captured in Mosul, German 16-year-old who ran away to be Isil bride
A 16-YEAR-OLD German Isil bride, who reportedly joined the jihadist group after being radicalised online, has been captured by Iraqi forces in the ruins of Mosul.
Linda Wenzel, from the small town of Pulsnitz, near Dresden, was discovered by troops with a group of 20 other suspected foreign female members of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) in a tunnel under the Old City. She is understood to have been handed over to American troops stationed in Iraq for questioning.
Pictures shared on social media show the girl being escorted by security forces, appearing pale and unveiled but wearing a colourful scarf around her neck. She was initially mistaken for a kidnapped Yazidi girl because of her lack of Arabic.
Mourtada al-aboudi, a soldier in the unit who captured the girl, said: “We found her holding a gun in her hand, we think she was brainwashed by Daesh. A Daesh sniper was watching her, so maybe she was forced into it.”
Linda was reported missing from her home a year ago, where she had been living with her mother, Katharina, and stepfather, Thomas.
She grew up in a Protestant family, and had not shown any interest in religion until a few months before her disappearance. She did consistently well at school and was a popular girl.
In the spring of 2016, she told her parents for the first time that she was interested in Islam. “We didn’t think much about it at the time. We bought her a Koran,” her mother told German television.
Friends in Pulsnitz say she converted around this time and was radicalised online in chat rooms. She started learning Arabic, taking the Koran to school, wearing conservative clothing and became fascinated with Islam. She began fasting for Ramadan, but told her parents she was on a diet. Her elder sister, Miriam, who had left the family home, began to suspect she had converted.
“But I didn’t want to make too much of it, I wanted to be open-minded,” she said. Police believe Linda had fallen in love with a Muslim man she met online who persuaded her to move to Syria to join him. Friends told German media she was also in touch with a family in nearby Dresden and someone in Hamburg who was involved in her radicalisation.
She left last July after telling her parents she wanted to stay the weekend at a friend’s house.
The alarm was not raised until she failed to return home that Sunday, two days after she left for the Middle East. She travelled to Istanbul posing as her mother and then down to Turkey’s border with Syria, where she crossed with the help of an Islamist group aligned with Isil.
A rival rebel group in the border area told Germany’s Bild newspaper they had held Linda for a few days, before members of the pro-isil faction arrived to meet her, claiming she “belonged to them”.
The jihadists then handed her over to an Isil fighter who is believed to have groomed her over the internet and convinced her to travel to the group’s so-called caliphate. Linda is thought to have made it to Mosul before the Iraqi army launched the offensive to retake the city in October.
Until six months before she fled to join Isil, she had never even travelled by train alone. “I am devastated by the fact that she was apparently completely brainwashed and persuaded to leave the country by someone and that she managed to hide it from me,” her mother said last year.
When her parents searched the teenager’s room, they found a copy of her air ticket, together with an Islamic prayer mat and a tablet computer.
The tablet had hundreds of Islamic images stored on it, as well as a second Facebook account her parents had not known about.
On this second account, Linda was in touch with people in the Middle East and shared messages such as “Pray, the end is approaching”.
If her identity is confirmed, Linda
‘We found her holding a gun in her hand, we think she was brainwashed. Maybe she was forced into it’
‘If this is Linda, we would reopen criminal proceedings set aside because we did not know her whereabouts’
could face prosecution in Germany on charges of colluding with terrorists against the state. If convicted, she could face a maximum sentence of three years in a juvenile prison. It is not clear whether she will be held in Iraq or deported back to Germany to face trial.
Lorenz Haase, chief prosecutor and spokesman for the Dresden prosecutor’s office, said: “At the moment, the priority is to determine whether this is Linda or not. The police will undertake all necessary investigations.
“If it is confirmed, we would reopen criminal proceedings against her that were set aside. We had set aside the proceedings as we did not know her whereabouts and she is a minor.”
A senior Iraqi judge told The Daily Telegraph earlier this year that foreign members of Isil would be tried in Iraqi courts, but as Linda is considered a minor, they may decide to extradite her. Four other German women were also reportedly discovered last week in a tunnel system built by Isil.
They were part of a group of 20 female fighters, including Russian, Turkish, Canadian and Chechen, apprehended in the last remaining pocket of Isil territory in Mosul.
Iraqi forces say they discovered weapons and suicide belts at the site.