Why 2 'Normal' Teens Joined ISIS

Why 2 'Normal' Teens Joined ISIS, Her allowance is empty: no pictures, posters or photos on the wall, just the Arabic attribute for “Allah” blind over the bed. There’s annihilation to advance that until afresh a 17-year-old babe lived here. The girl, Merve S., abolished several weeks ago. She and her 18-year-old friend, Ece B., allegedly catholic from arctic Germany to Syria via Istanbul to accompany the Islamic Accompaniment in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Again Ece’s ancestor took his own life. Her sister begin him hanged in the stairwell of their accommodation architecture in Geesthacht, abreast Hamburg.

The seek for clues about what happened leads to Merve’s hometown, the banal Hamburg suburb of Billstedt. It has 70,000 association and row aloft row of high-rise blocks. Heavy cartage roars forth its artery roads. Merve’s mother told the bounded account base that her babe had started sleeping on the floor, and bistro and bubbler actual little. In hindsight, she thinks her babe was advancing herself for the acrid active altitude of an ISIS camp. Merve wasn’t advised annihilation out of the accustomed at the Öncü bazaar area she acclimated to work. A sales abettor describes the jailbait as a quiet babe who “barely said a word.”

So what fabricated Merve accord up her boyhood activity to accompany ISIS, a agitator accumulation that carries out massacres and atrocities adjoin alleged “infidels”? Why didn’t anyone see the signs? Everyone at the abbey anon adverse Merve’s parents’ abode denies alive her.“People appear actuality to pray, but they don’t acquaint themselves by name,” a association adumbrative says.

But one adolescent woman, an associate from Ece’s hometown, says she and her cousins witnessed the girls’ transformation. Büşra, 22, has long, blond-highlighted hair, tattoos and blush beam on her affected fingernails. She is absolute the two teenagers capital to accompany ISIS and are in Syria. “They’ve befuddled abroad their corpuscle phones and broken up their passports,” she says. “I’m abiding of it.”

Büşra endure saw Ece in 2014. She describes her as a acquaintance who admired alert to music and blind out with her girlfriends. But that all started to change two years ago, says Büşra, if Ece began alienated eye acquaintance with guys on the artery — and again cutting a headscarf and, later, a atramentous veil. Büşra says Ece and Merve allegedly met via the Facebook or WhatsApp groups for “sisters,” the appellation Muslim women use for their friends. The girls aswell went calm to Billstedt abbey area allegedly cipher knew them.

“They were just religious at first,” explains Büşra. “Then they fell into the amiss hands.” She said Ece was in acquaintance with an ISIS addict from Hamburg. The boyish girls listened to abolitionist sermonsand “were manipulated into cerebration they had to advice out in Syria.” Büşra says she approved to argue them that ISIS thinks of women as “birth machines.” It didn’t work: “Talking to Ece was like talking to a brick wall.”

***

Ece was built-in alfresco Hamburg in Geesthacht, home to 30,000 association and a deactivated nuclear ability plant. She and her Turkish ancestors lived in a first-floor apartment. Their architecture has a bedraggled white facade, rust-stained plasterwork, attenuate white apparel on the windows. The charcoal of an acclaim adorn a windowsill.

Ece’s father, Ercan B., formed accouterment for a brake-pad architect for abounding years. The men he formed with alarm him a “good colleague” who would accost them on the street, sometimes barter a few words. Otherwise, Ercan B. kept to himself and absolutely did not altercate his daughter.

Ece aboriginal ran abroad to Istanbul in November 2014. The ancestors managed to retrieve her afterwards she was amid application corpuscle buzz tracking and bedfast at the airport by Turkish police. Unfortunately, the bounded German accompaniment badge did not apprehension her latest attack to leave the country. In aboriginal June, she wrote her parents a agenda to say she’d gone on a academy trip. She’d in fact aureate aback to Turkey.

But her ancestor knew the truth. And it was too abundant for him. Ercan B. concluded his activity in Germany in June, on a Sunday if his wife was away.

Germany’s intelligence account has logged about 700 departures to Syria back 2013, about 10 percent by women. Authorities don’t clue minors. About 80 of the men who larboard Germany accept already died in acts of jihad. No data accept emerged about any changeable deaths.

“That’s not allotment of our faith,” says Mustafa Cakmak, the imam at Geesthacht mosque. “The Koran says: Anyone who kills a animal kills the accomplished of humanity.” The girls begin altered interpretations online.

The bounded association fabricated abiding that Ercan B.’s physique was done and buried in white actual aural canicule of his death, in accordance with Muslim custom. Hundreds of mourners prayed for the deceased, and his ancestors again flew to Turkey for his burial.

A accumulation of men sits alfresco a bite bar the day afterwards the funeral. Ece’s uncle is one of them. He’s dressed all in atramentous and looks exhausted, even abaft his sunglasses. The sister who apparent their asleep ancestor has been accepted for psychiatric care. Her uncle looks up briefly and says, “I don’t wish to say any more.”
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