Kurdish special forces rescued a teenage Swedish girl from Islamic State-controlled territory near the city of Mosul, officials said on Tuesday.
Posted by
crash davis (aka trisha)
Feb 23 '16, 11:22
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BAGHDAD — Kurdish special forces rescued a teenage Swedish girl from Islamic State-controlled territory near the city of Mosul, officials said on Tuesday.
The raid, according to a statement released by the Kurdistan Regional Security Council, was conducted on Feb. 17. The statement misspelled the name of the Swedish girl, who had apparently left her hometown last summer to travel to Syria. She was identified in Swedish news reports as Marilyn Nevalainen, 16, from the Swedish city of Boras.
“She was misled by an ISIL member in Sweden to travel to Syria and later to Mosul,” the statement by Kurdish officials said, referring to an acronym for the Islamic State extremist group, also known as ISIS.
Kurdish officials said they had worked with the Swedish authorities and the girl’s family to find her, and that she was being provided with medical care and undergoing a debriefing by Iraqi Kurdish authorities.
“She will be transferred to Swedish authorities to return home once necessary arrangements are put in place,” the statement said.
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Kurdish officials said the United States did not participate in the raid, although American military trainers are working closely with Kurdish commandos in the fight against the Islamic State. The Americans are mostly in an advisory role, but they have participated in at least one raid with Kurdish commandos, in the northern Iraqi town of Hawija. In recent weeks, more United States Special Forces soldiers have arrived in Iraq on a mission to target ISIS leaders in raids.
A senior Kurdish official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the secrecy surrounding the operation, said Kurdish intelligence officers were able to identify the girl’s location through satellite signals and her use of the Internet. The official said that the unit of Kurdish commandos that conducted the raid was the same force that worked with the Americans in the Hawija raid.
Ms. Nevalainen’s case has been chronicled in the Swedish news media, although there are conflicting accounts about the events that led to her arrival in Mosul and when she was actually rescued.
One report, by Swedish Radio, said the girl and her boyfriend left Sweden last June and wound up in Syria, where the boyfriend trained with another militant group before the pair were captured by the Islamic State in August. According to Swedish press accounts, Ms. Nevalainen was pregnant when she left Sweden and gave birth after arriving in Syria.
Another report said she might have been freed by Kurdish forces much earlier than Feb. 17. Kurdish officials declined further comment.
“She has been freed,” Hewa Abdelzadeh, a reporter with Swedish Radio, said in a broadcast on Tuesday. “There’s no reason to doubt that. But there are some questions surrounding the circumstances of where and from whom she was freed. There is a longer story here that we still don’t have a grasp of.”
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