BAGHDAD — Kurdish special forces have rescued a 16-year-old Swedish girl from Islamic State militants near the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, Kurdish authorities said Tuesday.
The operation to free Marilyn Nevalainen, who went missing with her boyfriend last year, took place Feb. 17 after Sweden requested assistance in finding and rescuing her, the semiautonomous Kurdish region’s security council said in a statement. She will be transferred to Swedish authorities to return home “once necessary arrangements” are made, it said.
Some 300 Swedes have left to join extremist groups in Iraq and Syria over the past three years, according to Sweden’s security agency. Recruiters often prey on teenagers, grooming them online or in their communities.
In an interview with Kurdish television channel K24, Marilyn said she dropped out of school at age 14 and then met her boyfriend, who persuaded her to travel to Syria to join the Islamic State, a radical al-Qaeda offshoot also known as ISIL and ISIS.
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“First we were good together, but then he started to look at ISIS videos and started to speak about them, and I don’t know anything about ISIS or Islam,” she told K24. She said that when her boyfriend suggested leaving to join the Islamic State, she agreed, departing from Sweden on May 31 last year.
Swedish news reports after the couple’s disappearance said Marilyn’s boyfriend was 19 at the time and that she, then 15, was six months pregnant. The girl, from Boras, near Gothenburg, was living in a foster home at the time, the reports said. The Kurdish statement and interview made no mention of a baby.
The couple traveled by train and bus through Europe before crossing from Turkey into Syria, Marilyn said.
When the couple arrived in Syria, the Islamic State took them by bus to Mosul, where they were given a house. “In the house we didn’t have anything,” she said. “No electricity, no water, nothing. We didn’t have any money, either. It was a really hard life.”
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Marilyn’s disappearance has been widely covered by the Swedish news media, but there were discrepancies in the account her family relayed to the media and the girl’s television interview Tuesday.
Her mother told the Swedish media after her disappearance that Marilyn had joined the al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria but was kidnapped by the Islamic State in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo. The Islamic State did not recognize the couple’s marriage and separated them, the mother told Sweden’s Expressen newspaper.
Marilyn, who looked relaxed and smiled during the television interview, said that after she arrived in Mosul, she began making contact with her mother by phone, telling her that she wanted to come home.
The rescue was a purely Kurdish operation, according to a Kurdish security official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss details of a sensitive security operation.
In October, Kurdish and U.S. Special Operations forces carried out a joint raid near the Iraqi town of Hawijah, freeing 69 prisoners but failing to find Kurdish soldiers they hoped to rescue. One U.S. soldier was killed in the operation.
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