Mum frees Dutch teen jihadi bride, stuck in Turkey with no passport
A woman from Maastricht has freed her 19-year-old daughter from the Syrian city of Raqqa but is unable to get her back into the country because her passport has been cancelled, Dutch media report on Tuesday.
The girl, named as Aïcha, is a convert to Islam and travelled to Syria in February when she was 18 to marry Dutch jihadi Omar Yilmaz, a charismatic former soldier with a high media presence. According to media reports, Aïcha, who converted to Islam last summer, got in touch with Yilmaz via internet after he was interviewed on television in January.
According to Limburg media the girl’s mother, named as Monique, travelled to Turkey in October in an effort to find her daughter and made a second trip last week, despite being told it was too dangerous.
The two managed to leave Syria but were stopped at the Turkish border because the girl does not have a valid passport. The foreign affairs ministry is now involved and the two hope to be back in the Netherlands within a week, the mother’s lawyer Françoise Landerloo is quoted as saying by the NRC.
EenVandaag carried an interview with Monique earlier this year about her struggle to find her ‘blonde, blue-eyed girl who liked going out and playing piano’.
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