Everyone goes through an angsty rebellious stage during their teenage years. But Linda Wenzel, a 16-year-old from Germany, took her teenage rebellion all the way to Iraq, where she became a sniper for ISIS.
According to the Daily Mail, tensions at home due to her parents' separation and her mother's new relationship led Wenzel to run away from her home near Dresden, Germany last year. By the time Wenzel boarded a flight from Frankfurt to Turkey, she was already being monitored by German officials who considered her a possible terror suspect.
Wenzel's friends told police she had decided to learn Arabic out of the blue. She even asked her school if she could wear a headscarf to class.
Her mother told German reporters, "We didn't think anything of it, and even bought her a copy of the Qur'an."
In hindsight, that was probably not the best idea, considering that Linda was spending a lot of time talking to ISIS followers on internet chatrooms and lurking around ISIS Facebook groups. It is now believed that she ran away to marry a jihadi she met online.
This past week, when Iraqi forces retook the city of Mosul, a woman thought to be Wenzel was captured with ISIS troops. The girl, western in appearance, was among the 20 female ISIS soldiers hailing from Russia, Turkey, Canada, Libya and Syria.
If the girl is, in fact, Wenzel, she is not looking so good -- she was extremely pale and covered in dust when Iraqi troops found her.
Unfortunately, Wenzel's story is becoming all too common. The terrorist organization has recruited over 20,000 foreigners, many of them teenagers, over the internet. ISIS is known to lure women with the promise of marriage to jihadi soldiers.
If this young woman is Linda Wenzel, hopefully she is returned to her parents who can teach her something about running away from home. But sadly, her time within the brutal terrorist group was probably more than enough of a lesson.
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