Austrian ‘Poster Girl’ for the Islamic State Was Used as a Sex Slave Before Militants Beat Her to Death
A teenage girl who fled her native Austria to join the Islamic State group was used as a sex slave for militant trainees before she was beaten to death, a former prisoner of the Islamist group reported.
Soon after 17-year-old Samra Kesinovic and her 15-year-old friend Sabina Selimovic arrived in Syria from Vienna in April 2014, the two became “poster girls” for the radical Islamic group, the Daily Mail reported.
The teens appeared on Islamic State websites holding AK-47s and surrounded by armed men. But by October of that year, Kesinovic, sickened by the group’s brutal murders, had had enough and was done.
Speculation regarding the fate of the two girls spread when a United Nations official confirmed earlier this year that a girl “of Bosnian origin from Austria” had died in Syria, the Sun reported.
“Both were recruited by Islamic State. One was killed in the fighting in Syria, the other has disappeared,” U.N. Security Council official David Scharia said.
It has since been confirmed that Kesinovic was killed by Islamic State members while trying to flee their stronghold in Raqqa. Before her death, the teen served as a sex slave for the militants, a Tunisian former prisoner who claims to have lived with the two girls told the Austrian newspaper, Kronen Zeitung.
The Tunisian woman said Kesinovic and Selimovic lived together in the same house and were viewed as a “sexual present for new fighters.”
The two teens were both children of refugees who fled war-torn Bosnia to live in Austria in the 1990s.
According to the Daily Mail, before the two departed for Syria, they left a note for their families that read, “Don’t look for us. We will serve Allah and we will die for him.”
It is believed that after arriving in Syria via Turkey in April 2014, both girls married jihadists.
The Daily Mail reported that Mirsad O., an Islamic preacher from Bosnia living in Vienna, known by the Islamic name of “Ebu Tejma,” was allegedly responsible for radicalizing Kesinovic and Selimovic, though he has denied the claims.
He was arrested for his role in an Austrian-based terrorist funding network in November 2015.
Shortly after arriving in Syria, Selimovic communicated to a French magazine via SMS messages that she was content with her life in the war-torn region and that she had married a soldier.
“Here I can really be free. I can practice my religion,” she reportedly said. “I couldn’t do that in Vienna.”
Austrian Interior Ministry spokesman Alexander Marakovits acknowledged that the draw of the Islamic State for young people was a growing problem for the authorities.
“If we can catch them before they leave, we have the chance to work with their parents and other institutions to bring the youngsters out of the sphere of influence that prompted them to act in this way the first place,” he said. “Once they have left the country, even if they then changed their minds, it is then almost impossible to get them back.”
According to the BBC, roughly half a million Muslims live in Austria today, around 6 per cent of the population. Many Austrian Muslims have Turkish or Bosnian roots.
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