Samra Kesinovic was used as a sex slave by the Islamic State before being killed while trying to flee, it has been alleged.
The girl, along with 15-year-old Sabina Selimovic, produced horrified headlines around the world in 2014: two beautiful teenagers of Bosnian extraction who ran away from home in Austria to join the Islamic State. “Don’t look for us. We will serve Allah, and we will die for him,” they wrote in a farewell note to their parents.
They became poster pinups for the jihad, donning burqas and brandishing rifles to pose with ISIS fighters. They took to social media to advertise the joys of life in the Islamic State, with Sabina declaring, “Here I can really be free. I can practice my religion. I couldn’t do that in Vienna.” She claimed to have taken an ISIS soldier as a husband. She was all of 15 years old at the time.
Samra, two years older, also supposedly took a jihadi husband, but apparently her domestic bliss in the terror state was short-lived. Reports of her disillusionment and death began circulating in early 2015. At first she was thought to have died on the battlefield – a fate that apparently befell the younger Sabina – but soon it was said she was caught while attempting to flee the ISIS capital of Raqqa and beaten to death.
The full story of Samra Kesinovic’s fate has now been supplied by a Tunisian woman who claims to have lived with the girls in Raqqa. She said Samra and Sabina were used as sex slaves by the savages they supported – given away as a “sexual present for new fighters,” according to the UK Daily Mail.
The Tunisian woman succeeded where Samra failed, and was able to escape from the Islamic State to tell her story. This woman is evidently one of the insider sources who described Samra growing sick over the violence she had seen in the Islamic State and deciding to return home, only to be murdered by ISIS militants when she was caught.
The UK Independent notes that U.N. counter-terrorism officials described one Austrian girl “disappearing” around the same time the other was killed while fighting in Syria, the latter presumably a reference to Sabina Selimovic.
According to Austria’s The Local, the Austrian government still has not officially confirmed Samra Kesinovic’s death.
The Daily Mail notes that despite the horrible fate of the ISIS “poster girls,” ISIS recruiting among young Muslims from the Caucasus, whose families fled to Europe during the Chechen war, remains a major concern for Austrian 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,” said Austrian Interior Ministry spokesman Alexander Marakovits. “Once they have left the country, even if they then changed their minds, it is then almost impossible to get them back.”