Swedish girl tells of life under ISIS

Marilyn Nevalainen was just 15 years old, and pregnant, when she left Sweden with a jihadist recruit, though she did not realise what a mistake she had made until she was in Iraq.

Desperate, she called home from the ISIS stronghold of Mosul in northern Iraq begging for help, and was ultimately rescued by Kurdish forces.

She landed on Thursday in Stockholm with her parents.

The police said her boyfriend, a Moroccan who reached Sweden as an unaccompanied minor three years ago, was dead.

Kurdish forces rescued the girl near Mosul on February 17, according to a statement from the Kurdistan Regional Security Council.

In an interview broadcast this week by TV channel Kurdistan 24, the Swede said she met her boyfriend in 2014 and that he became radicalised after watching ISIS videos. “Then he said he wanted to go to ISIS and I said, ‘Okay, no problem,’ because I did not know what ISIS meant or what Islam was,” she said.

She was pregnant when they left Sweden in May 2015, taking trains and buses across Europe until they finally crossed the border from Turkey to Syria. They were then driven by ISIS jihadists to Mosul.

“In my house we had nothing, no electricity, no water, nothing. It was totally different from how I lived in Sweden, because in Sweden we have everything, and when I was there I did not have anything, did not have any money either. It was a very hard life,” she said.

“When I got a phone, I started to contact my mum and I said I wanted to go home. She contacted the Swedish authorities,” she said.

The Swedish media published desperate text messages she sent her mother while she was stuck in Iraq.

“I’m going to die in a bombing or they’re going to beat me to death or I’m going to kill myself mum, really, I don’t have the strength to go on,” she wrote.