For almost thirty days the mother of a missing 15-year-old girl had no idea what had happened to her daughter.
One day, the phone rings and it’s her daughter on the other end of the line – alive and well. Then, the conversation turns bad. Through the crackling, her daughter says she has run away with her boyfriend to join Jabhat al-Nusra, a branch of al-Qaeda.
According to The Local, this nightmare scenario was recently experienced by a Swedish mother:
The girl told her family that she was currently in Homs but that the couple were planning to travel to another city shortly, adding that she would live with a group of women while her partner began military training.
“I am waiting to hear back from them,” the teenager’s mother is quoted as saying by Aftonbladet.
“I cannot describe how terrible this is and I just wish I could go there myself and fetch her.”
The girl has been missing since May 31st and has now been put on an international watch list, according to Opposing Views.
The Local notes that a suspected 30 Swedish girls have left home to join jihadi groups.
A possible explanation was offered by Magnus Ranstorp, a member of the Swedish Defence University:
“For a lot of the girls this is a form of emancipation in a perverse way. They think they are getting away from the leash of patriarchal structures in their families or the areas where they live,” he said.
The government has also commented on the girls and others leaving the safety of the country to join jihadi groups. The Local writes:
“‘It is completely unacceptable that Swedish citizens are travelling to [join] IS, financing the organization, or fighting for it,’ Justice Minister Morgan Johansson and Home Affairs Minister Anders Ygeman wrote in a joint article in Sweden’s Dagens Nyheter newspaper.
‘We have a responsibility for what our citizens do both here, at home and in other countries,’ they said.”
The Swedish government is also considering legislation that would ban its citizens from joining terrorist groups such as ISIS.