IT WAS GOING TO END POORLY, ONE WAY OR ANOTHER: Teen Islamic State pin-up girl changes her mind, is ‘beaten to death:’
A TEENAGE girl who ran away from her Austrian home to join IS has reportedly been killed after trying to flee the terrorist capital of Raqqa.
Samra Kesinovic, 17, went to Syria in April 2014 with her 16-year-old friend Sabina Selimovic, where they became propaganda poster girls for the Islamist group.
Now several Austrian newspapers are claiming Samra has been beaten to death, citing insider sources and an interview with a Tunisian woman who lived with the pair before escaping.
A year ago, Lee Smith of Tablet magazine explored: “Why the Teenage Girls of Europe Are Joining ISIS.” Note the prescient and chilling turn the last paragraph quoted below takes:
It is a striking fact that ISIS appeals not only to young men, but also young European women, many hundreds of whom have gone to Syria and Iraq to marry Islamic State fighters. Sure, some of them, like at least one teenaged French Jewish girl who left for Syria, may have come to regret their decision. But that hardly alters the essential point: The girls sought out IS fighters because the West seems weak and unmanly and they pine for real men who are willing to kill and die for what they believe in.
Why? Europe’s got great health care, welfare, and lots of attractive young men and attractive women who, unlike the vast majority of women in the Middle East outside of Israel, are sexually available. So, why given a choice between a comfortable, if somewhat boring, life as a pharmacist in Hamburg, or fighting and dying in the desert, are thousands of Western Muslims opting for the latter?
Because, for all the awesome social services and consumer goods it can offer, Europe has become incapable of endowing the lives of its citizens, Muslim or not, with meaning. A generation of young European Muslims are giving up their relatively easy lives in Malmö, Marseilles, and Manchester for the battlefields of Syria and Iraq, because Europe is devoid of values worth living—or dying—for. They are leaving for the same reason that Europe’s Jews are moving to Israel: Strength and a sense of purpose can be found elsewhere, whether it’s ISIS, Vladimir Putin, Ali Khameni, or the IDF.
European security services are worried that the large number of jihadist fighters with Western passports are destined to cause trouble should they come back to the continent. They’re worried, they say, about the special skills militants might obtain abroad and then employ at home—like Mehdi Nemmouche, the Frenchman who killed four people at the Brussels Museum in May.
Joyce Carol Oates used to enjoy writing about the temptations faced by teenage girls — perhaps she could deign to write some thoughts on what drove Samra and Sabrina to chuck it all and join ISIS.
Related: At Ace of Spades, “Fundamental Concepts — Nothing to Believe In.”