A video of a 16-year-old German schoolgirl, who ran away from home to join ISIS as a jihadi bride, has emerged online, showing her capture by Iraqi forces in the city of Mosul.
It appears Wenzel was radicalized in Germany. Wenzel's friends said that around the time of her disappearance, she would wear a hijab at school and carried a copy of the Koran. She was also struggling with her parents' recent divorce.
In July 2016, Wenzel told her mother she was spending the weekend with a friend. Instead, she left the country to marry a Chechen fighter who had been grooming her online. Wenzel used her mother's bank information to buy a ticket and fly from Frankfurt to Istanbul, where she was smuggled into Iraq to marry the online recruiter. He was later killed in battle.
"I am devastated by the fact that she was apparently completely brainwashed and persuaded to leave the country by someone, and that she managed to hide it from me," mother Katharina Wenzel said last year, according to The Times.
Although the German consulate is working hard to get Wenzel home, she remains in custody in Baghdad where she is being questioned by American and Iraqi interrogators over her affiliations.
Under Iraq's counter-terrorism laws, Wenzel may face the death penalty if found guilty of fighting for ISIS. But she may be released as a minor and a foreigner.
Women are also exposed to Jihadist propaganda through online ISIS media channels like At-Tibyan Publications, which spreads the message that there is a place for all in Islam:"My dear sister, truly, you have an important and great part. And you have to rise up and fulfill your duty role in Islam in the confrontation of the new crusade, led by all countries of the world against Islam and the Muslims ... Listen," according to Augsburger Allgemeine.
BfV reported that 890 individuals travelled towards Syria/Iraq from Germany in 2016 alone to participate or support ISIS activities.
A Swedish teen who made headlines around the world on Feb. 23, after being rescued from ISIS-controlled territory by Kurdish special forces has spoken out in her first interview.
In the interview Marlin Stivani Nivarlain said that she stopped going to school at age 14 and met her boyfriend soon afterward.
"First it was good together, but then he started to look at ISIS videos, and started to speak about them," Marlin said.
"I didn't know anything about Islam or ISIS," she said.
Marlin said that after some time her boyfriend came to her with a proposal.
"He said he wanted to go to ISIS," she said.
"I said no problem, because I didn't know what ISIS means, what Islam is."
After deciding to make the dangerous journey, Marlin and her boyfriend left on May 31, 2015.
They first took the train from Sweden to Denmark, then traveled by train to Germany, then they took another train to Hungary through Slovakia, after which they traveled to Serbia. In Serbia, she said, they hitchhiked to Bulgaria. From Bulgaria they took the bus to the border of Turkey, and after crossing the border into Turkey they took a bus to the Syrian border and crossed over.
After arriving in Syria they surrendered themselves to ISIS.
"ISIS took us in a bus with some other women and men to Mosul in Iraq," she said.
The ISIS terrorist group took over the city of Mosul with a population of 2.5 million in June 2014.
"Then I got my house, in the house we didn't have anything, no electricity, no water, nothing."
"Didn't have any money either, it was really a hard life."
Marlin said life there was completely different from life in Sweden, where, compared to Mosul, she said there was everything.
She soon developed a desire to go back to Sweden. After obtaining a phone, Marlin called her mother saying that she wanted to go back home.
Her mother then contacted the Swedish authorities. The Kurdistan Region Security Council said in a statement on Feb. 23 that it had been contacted by Swedish authorities with a request to find and rescue the girl.
The teen is currently being held in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdish autonomous region in Iraq, before she will be handed over to Swedish authorities.
Marlin said that she is excited to meet her family again and "have a happy life."
For years now, European nations have struggled with ISIS sympathizers traveling to Syria or Iraq to join the terrorist group. ISIS's sophisticated online recruitment has proven effective in luring people over to live in its self-proclaimed caliphate. According to the European Union, thousands of Europeans have traveled to Syria to join ISIS.
Europol sent out a warning earlier this month saying that an estimated 5,000 Europeans have since returned from Syria after having been trained at terrorist camps.