The four women were captured by Iraqi soldiers following the liberation of Mosul from Isis control earlier this month. They were discovered inside a tunnel where they had taken refuge and where weapons and explosives belts had also been uncovered.
Die Welt reported on Wednesday that all four women have German citizenship and come from three different states. The most high-profile of the four is 16-year-old Linda W. from Saxony, who has become the subject of international headlines because she went missing from home last year at age the young age of 15.
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Linda W. had disappeared from her home in Pulsnitz last summer and fled to Turkey, then to Syria, before arriving in Iraq, Die Welt reports. She reportedly had been in contact online beforehand with Islamists and became radicalized.
The three others include a Morocco-born woman and her adult daughter from Mannheim, Baden-Württemberg, as well as a Chechnya-born woman who had been living in Detmold, North Rhine-Westphalia, according to Welt.
The four are currently being detained in Baghdad, and have been visited by German diplomats. Authorities are currently trying to bring the women back to Germany.
Federal prosecutors in Germany are investigating them on suspicion of belonging to a terrorist group.
A journalist who visited Linda W. told German broadcasters NDR and WDR, as well as the Süddeutsche Zeitung, at the weekend that she just wanted to go home, and regretted joining the terror group. She also said that she had willingly travelled to the Middle East from Germany, and married a jihadist fighter.
“I want to go home to my family,” she told the reporter.
“I want to get away from the war, away from the many weapons, the noise.”
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