Reports: Possibly Pregnant Teens Who Joined ISIS Killed in Syria
A pair of Austrian teenagers who apparently fled to Syria to support ISIS may be pregnant by a pair of Chechen fighters, according to a probably-fake report in the New York Post. Several more reputable news outlets, meanwhile, are reporting that either Samra Kesinovic, 16, or her friend Sabina Selimovic, 15, may have been killed in Syria, where they've been since April of this year. The two girls are believed to have become radicalized after attending a local mosque in Vienna, and Interpol has confirmed their disappearance, posting several photos of the two girls in both Western clothing and in burqas. Virtually everything else about the two girls is in dispute, though; we don't even know which of them may have been killed.
The two are both from Bosnian immigrant families; they disappeared on April 10 of this year, part of an unfortunate and nearly unbelievable trend of European teen girls attempting to get to Syria to join ISIS. They reportedly wrote in a letter to their families, "No point looking for us: See you in paradise...We will serve Allah and die for him."
According to the Post, the Central European News reported that Selimovic and Kesinovic announced on social media that they are both pregnant by a pair of Chechen militant brothers. But Central European News is primarily a threadbare-looking photo agency that aggregates odd news from other outlets; there's no other confirmation from any reputable news source that the two are pregnant, or even what social media network they used to announce their impending bundles of terror-joy.
The theory that one of the girls might be dead is somewhat more credible. Alexander Marakovits, a spokesman for the Austrian interior ministry, told one German news outlet, "We also have this information, but cannot say with absolute certainty that it is true. But the parents have been informed their daughter could be dead."
But The Local, an English news site in Austria, claims that the two girls contacted their friends on WhatsApp to say they're alive and well. The outlet claims that Selimovic was posting "gloomy" messages, but not because her bosom buddy in ill-advised jihading had just died: they were "most likely related to the death of an acquaintance of her husband."
[Photo of Kesinovic, left, and Selimovic courtesy of Interpol.]