A teenage girl from Vienna who joined ISIS, and served as the terror group's poster girl for recruiting young women, is believed to be dead. Allegations have it that the 17-year-old has been beaten to death after trying to escape from the group.
The Local reports that there are now reasons to believe that Samra Kesinovic and her 15-year-old friend Sabina Selimovic, who both travelled to Syria together to join ISIS, are now both dead. Reports in the Österreich and Kronen Zeitung tabloids cited insider accounts that Samra was beaten to death for attempting to escape.
Interior and foreign ministries are yet to give their confirmation of this. "We cannot comment on individual cases," shared Foreign Ministry spokesman Thomas Schnöll to the Austria Press Agency. Interior Ministry spokesman Karl-Heinz Grundböck also had the same sentiment.
The Kronen Zeitung tabloid also reported that a Tunisian woman said she was able to join ISIS in Syria but later escaped. She said she was able to see and live with Samra and Sabina in Raqqa.
This is not the first time that the two girls made the news with regard their fate. Last year, an Israeli expert from the UN claimed that one of the girls died fighting in Syria while the other vanished. While there were no reports of who died and who vanished, the new report of Samra being beaten to death led to the conclusion that Sabina was the one who got killed last year.
The two girls are considered poster girls for the ISIS, because of their photos circulating on social networking sites holding Kalashnikov rifles and surrounded by armed men. According to Austrian police, these photos were often used to recruit young girls.
Experts have also asserted that these young Austrian women were married off to ISIS fighters and then sent off the battlefield. It is believed that the jihadists use girls mainly as fighters because they believe that anyone killed off by a woman would not be allowed to enter heaven.
Both Samra and Sabina were raised in Austria by their secular Muslim parents. When news broke out of their joining ISIS, Samra's uncle claimed the teen was just tricked into joining. "They were normal girls until their recent involvement with local problem boys, who we believe have them pregnant." the uncle named as Amir shared to European Knights Project last year. "We had no idea this would happen and this trick is going to come to pass."
