The two Austrian teenage girls who ran away from home to join ISIS and became the terrorist group's "poster girls" say they've made a big mistake and want to return home, The New York Post reported on Friday.
Sabina Selimovic, 15, and Samra Kesinovic, 17, grew up in the Austrian capital of Vienna and left their European homes to be groomed by the terrorists in April. Upon their departure, they left a note for their parents saying "Don't look for us. We will serve Allah - and we will die for him." They also started educating classmates about their religious lifestyle shortly before they bolted for Syria.
Both the girls are believed to be pregnant after being married off to holy war fighters once they arrived.
Austrian authorities say the girls' social media pages have been hacked and manipulated to show what may be fabricated messages about the life they were having in Syria, possibly to try to encourage other young women to join the cause, according to the Daily Mail. Some photos showed the girls smiling in Muslim garb or carrying weapons.
"It is clear that whoever is operating their pages it probably is not the girls and that they are being used for propaganda," one Austrian security official said, as reported by the New York Post.
Selimovic and Kesinovic are believed to be living in the northern Syrian city of Raqqa, which is currently controlled by ISIS. They have somehow been able to contact their families and tell them they want to come home, but are scared to flee because the world now associates them with terrorism after their images have appeared in the news media.
The motivation for the girls' disappearance is still unclear, but they did have contact with Chechen teens and visited a mosque in Vienna before they left.
Two other teenage girls, aged 16 and 14, were also caught while trying to flee Austria, and police now suspect Selimovic and Kesinovic were trying to radicalize other young girls.
Authorities suspect there are as many as 130 Austrian nationals fighting alongside jihadists in other countries.
