The two Austrian teenage girls who became ‘poster girls’ for jihad in Syria are now desperate to come home after getting completely disillusioned with their new lifestyles.
Samra Kesinovic, 17, and her friend Sabina Selimovic, 15, who grew up in the Austrian capital Vienna, were persuaded to head to Syria and take part in the holy war in April.
The girls had started lecturing schoolmates about their lifestyle and when they left Vienna in April they left behind a note telling their parents: 'Don’t look for us. We will serve Allah – and we will die for him'.
Once they arrived it is believed they were married off to local fighters and both the girls are thought to be pregnant.
Police in their homeland Austria say that the girls' social media accounts were taken over and manipulated to broadcast what they now think were fake messages about the life they were having, and using them as poster girls to encourage other young girls to head to Syria.
But security service insiders have told Austrian media that the girls have managed to contact their families to say they have had enough, and want to come home.
However they warn that there is almost now no chance that they will be able to leave their new lives after they became internationally famous and the images were shared all round the world.
Austrian newspaper Oesterreich, which revealed that the girls now wanted to come home, is known to have close connections to those investigating the disappearance of the two girls and is in close contact with their families.
Both sets of parents had been trying to find ways to contact their daughters and it is believed some way of communicating had been established.
The paper said that the girls are currently in the Islamic State controlled city of Rakka in northern Syria, had been married to Chechen fighters upon their arrival in Syria and were both pregnant.
Spokesman for the Interior Ministry, Karl-Heinz Grundboeck, said however that decision may be too late.
He said: 'The main problem is about people coming back to Austria. Once they leave it is almost impossible.'
The news comes despite reports which surfaced last month that one of the girls may have been killed.
However, these reports were never officially confirmed and the Interior Ministry could not ascertain if they were correct.
The motivations of the two Bosnian girls are unclear but before leaving, they had contact with Chechen youths, and visited a mosque in Vienna's second district.
And police also expressed concerns that the pair were inspiring their contemporaries after two other teenage girls were caught attempting to flee the country to join IS ranks.
Little information was given about the copycat pair hoping to join Islamic State apart from the fact that one was 16 and the other was 14 and their parents were apparently from Iraq.
Police now want to find out how they became radicalised, and whether anybody had helped them plan their trip to Syria which was apparently set to take place via Turkey - following the same route as the other two girls.
The pair were caught when the mother of a third friend who was supposed to be travelling with them became suspicious about the amount of luggage her daughter was packing.
As many as 130 people from Austria are now believed to be fighting as jihadists abroad.
More than half of Austrian's jihadists originally come from the Caucasus region and have a valid residence permit in Austria.
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