Politics

German Girl Who Joined ISIS Faces Possible Death Sentence

The 16-year-old German schoolgirl who ran away from home to join ISIS and was captured in Mosul may face the death penalty according to Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, the UK Daily Mail reported Monday.

According to the Daily Mail:

‘You know teenagers under certain laws, they are accountable for their actions especially if the act is a criminal activity when it amounts to killing innocent people.’

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Linda Wenzel , the 16-year-old, who left her home in Pulsnitz, eastern Germany, last year to join the terror group, is desperate to return to Europe amid fears she could spend years in jail.

Iraqi intelligence officials told the Associated Press that the teenager allegedly worked with ISIS’s feared police force.

The German is being held in a prison at Baghdad’s airport together with other foreign women found in Mosul, including citizens from Belgium, France, Syria and Iran.

Hundreds more non-Iraqi women with ISIS links and suspected of carrying out terrorist attacks are being held at a prison in the Mosul area, Iraqi officials told the AP earlier this week.

Earlier this month, Iraqi authorities opened criminal proceedings against Wenzel.

German diplomats were confident she would be spared the death penalty – but feared she could be detained for years in Iraq.

Charges were laid against the 16-year-old and three other German women captured in the ISIS stronghold of Mosul in July.

A representative of the Iraqi judiciary has informed German diplomats that the attorney general has opened a corresponding ‘formal criminal procedure,’ according to Spiegel magazine.

Schoolgirl Linda fled to Turkey then into Syria last year from her hometown of Pulsnitz after being groomed online by a Chechen ISIS fighter who she married.

Linda Wenzel was captured by Iraqi forces during the fall of Mosul after many months of bloody fighting.  According to counter terrorism sources in Iraq, she could receive the death penalty or a long prison sentence.  Due to a quirk in their law, if she receives the death penalty, she would go to prison until she turns twenty two, at which time she would be executed.

 She said she is “doing fine” despite a bullet wound in her left leg that she said “is from a helicopter attack.”

She is currently in a military hospital ward in Baghdad, according to the report.

German paper Bild reported last month that Linda’s father, whose name was only given as Reiner W, learned of his missing daughter’s whereabouts on the radio as he was working on the construction of a German highway.

“I had a breakdown where I heard that Linda is alive,” Bild quoted the divorced father as saying. “I so much wish that my Linda will come home healthy again. I will always be there for her.”

Wenzel ran away from her home in the small eastern German town of Pulsnitz last summer, shortly after converting to Islam, according to German security officials.

She had been in touch with IS members online and was married to one of the extremist group’s fighters after arriving in the group’s territory.

Her husband died shortly after the marriage, the German media reported.

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