Two Austrian tabloids are claiming that a 17-year-old Viennese girl who ran away last year with a friend to join ISIS was beaten to death by members of the terrorist group. The report hasn’t been confirmed by any official government agency; it’s the latest of several conflicting stories about the girls’ fate over the last year.
Samra Kesinovic, now 17, and Sabina Selimovic, now 16, both daughters of Bosnian immigrant families living in Vienna, ran away last year. They reportedly left a note saying they planned to join ISIS in Syria to “fight for Islam,” and told their families, “No point in looking for us...See you in paradise. We will serve Allah and die for him.”
Last September, some tabloid reports claimed that the girls were pregnant by ISIS fighters, and/or that they’d been killed in battle. And now, a new claim repeated in two different tabloids says Kesinovic was beaten to death in the city of Raqqa after trying to flee the group. According to The Local Austria, an English language news source, the tabloid Kronen Zeitung cites “a Tunisian woman who also travelled to Syria to join the jihadists last year but later escaped and returned home,” and who says she lived with the two girls in Raqqa.
Both girls were previously listed as missing persons on Interpol’s website; both pages have been removed.
Kesinovic and Selimovic are, amazingly, not the only teenagers who have chosen to join ISIS. A story in the New York Times earlier this year explored how the group recruited three teenage girls from London, 16 and 15 years old.
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A photo of Kesinovic circulated by Interpol.