A Swedish teen who ran away to be with ISIS has told of her “really hard” life among the terrorists, claiming she was tricked into the misadventure by her boyfriend.
In her first interview since Kurdish special forces rescued her from northern Iraq, the now-16-year-old claimed she was a school dropout when she met her boyfriend in mid-2014 and he talked her into leaving home with him to link up with the savages.
“First we were good, but then he started to look at ISIS videos and speak about them and stuff like that,” Marlin Stivani Nivarlain told Kurdistan 24.
“Then he said he wanted to go to ISIS and I said OK, no problem, because I didn’t know what ISIS means, what Islam is — nothing.”
The couple left Sweden in May 2015 and traveled across Europe by bus and train until reaching Turkey and crossing into Syria.
From there, ISIS militants bused them and others to Mosul in neighboring Iraq and provided them with a house.
But Nivarlain was mortified to find that there was no electricity or running water.
“I didn’t have any money either — it was a really hard life,” Nivarlain said, looking relaxed and healthy.
“When I had a phone, I started to contact my mom and I said, ‘I want to go home.’ ”
The teenager was rescued on Feb. 17 and is currently in Iraq’s Kurdistan region. She eventually will be handed over to Swedish authorities.
Smiling occasionally, the girl compared life under ISIS to that in Europe.
“In Sweden, we have everything, and when I was there [in Iraq], we didn’t have anything,” she said.
In 2014, two Austrian girls abandoned their families to join ISIS and later admitted they had made a huge mistake.
Samra Kesinovic, 17, and Sabina Selimovic, 15, traded their comfortable lives for a life of evil engineered by terrorists.
For weeks, social-media accounts believed to belong to the girls had been posting pictures and information that seemed to suggest the young duo enjoyed living among the Islamic State thugs.
The teens were believed to be married, pregnant and living in the ISIS-controlled city of Raqqa in northern Syria.
Eventually, they sent a message to their families that they wanted to return home.
The girls were never heard from again and some reports have suggested they might have been killed after trying to escape.
Security services estimate that hundreds of Western men and women have left home to join ISIS since the group overran large parts of Iraq and Syria in June 2014.
A mother who took her 14-month-old son to Syria to join Islamic State fighters was jailed for six years by a British court earlier this month.
With Reuters