Austrian teenage girls tricked into joining Syria terrorists
Austrian authorities say they believe two teenage girls that vanished from their homes in Vienna earlier in April may have been tricked into going to Syria to join foreign-backed insurgents and terrorists in the country in the name of “holy war.”
The first hints of where Samra Kesinovic, 16, and Sabina Selimovic, 15, went were a number of social media posts claiming the girls had gone to fight a “holy war.”
The development comes as al-Qaeda-linked Takfiri propagandists and local preachers across Europe have become increasingly active in social networking site and a number of community mosques, deceiving Muslim youth and young converts into joining terrorist gangs in the Muslim nation of Syria and kill other Muslims in the name of a “holy struggle.”
The girl’s parents told the Dnevni Avaz (Daily Voice), a newspaper in Bosnia and Herzegovina, that the pair had left behind letters in which they said they were going to Syria to fight “for Islam.”
New photos on Facebook pages of the two female teenagers show them holding Kalashnikov automatic rifles, and in some cases they are surrounded by armed men.
In their latest post, they said they were going to get married so they could become “holy warriors,” according to the Daily Mail.
Austrian officials reportedly believe the girls are in a training camp and are already “married and living in the homes of their new husbands,” without elaborating.
It is further reported that the girls arrived Thursday in Adana, Turkey, which is about 100 km from the Syrian border, according to the Dnevni Avaz.
The parents of the girls say they don’t believe the Facebook messages are being written by their daughters, but admitted they had recently started going to a local mosque run by a radical Imam, Ebu Tejma.
The girls come from Bosnia refugee families who settled in Austria after the war in the 1990s, but both were born in Austria.
Despite the growing cases of young European individuals traveling to Syria to join the armed insurgents, there has been to reports of effective efforts on the part of European and Turkish authorities to halt such criminal enterprise of sending youth to war zones.
