Dutch mother rescues daughter from Islamic State stronghold in Syria

A 19-year-old Dutch teenager who converted to Islam so that she could marry her jihadist boyfriend has been detained by police in the Netherlands after her mother travelled to the Islamic State stronghold of Raqqa in Syria to bring her home to Maastricht.

Despite being advised by police that the rescue mission was too dangerous and that she could be prosecuted for assisting jihadists, mother and daughter established contact through Facebook – and managed to escape together across the border to Turkey earlier this week.

The mother, who has been identified only as “Monique”, is known to have entered Syria wearing a burqa to hide her identity. That is how she moved around Raqqa – which was captured by Islamic State in July and declared the capital of its self-proclaimed caliphate – and most likely how they escaped.

Notorious

The daughter, named “Aicha”, left the Netherlands in February to convert to Islam and marry Omar Yilmaz, a jihadist notorious for the fact that he was a soldier in the Dutch army before travelling to Syria to train fellow Muslims fighting against the forces of president Bashar al-Assad.

In a programme on Dutch television in September, Monique told how she’d felt helpless as she watched her daughter change from “an enthusiastic Dutch teenager to a radical Muslim” in a matter of months – while she and Yilmaz were in contact on social media.

She said Aicha had regarded Yilmaz as “a sort of Robin Hood”.

She recalled how when police became aware that Aicha intended to travel to Syria they confiscated her passport and warned her about the dangers – but she still managed to make arrangements in secret and travelled using her Dutch identity card instead.

The couple married, but the relationship didn’t work out. They separated a few months later – and Aicha sent an appeal for help to her mother via Facebook.

“She wants to come home but she can’t leave Raqqa without help”, Monique is reported in Dutch media as telling friends and family before she left for Syria. “Sometimes you have to do what you have to do. This is what I think is right.”

There was a last-minute hitch as mother and daughter left Syria and crossed into Turkey, where Aicha was immediately arrested for not having a passport.

However, the Dutch foreign ministry intervened and officials arranged to have them flown back to the Netherlands, where Aicha was arrested a second time, this time for questioning about the contacts who helped her get to Syria, the route she took, and who she met there.

“It is quite remarkable that the mother managed to find her daughter and get her home,” said the family’s lawyer, Françoise Landerloo.

The National Counter-terrorism Co-ordinator Dick Schoof revealed recently that of roughly 100 Dutch jihadists who’ve gone to Syria, some 30 are women.

A 15-year-old Dutch girl taken off a plane in Dusseldorf last summer was the youngest so far prevented by police from making the journey.