MOSCOW (Sputnik) – The Swedish teenager, then 15-year-old, left foster care to travel with her older boyfriend to join Daesh in June 2015. Earlier in the week, the girl was successfully freed in a covert operation in the Iraqi city of Mosul, according to the daily. Nevalainen told reporters she was deceived and forced to go to Iraq by her boyfriend.
"It was we ourselves who asked [social services] for help, and that help ended up unfortunately with our daughter in Syria," the father of the teenager was quoted as saying by the Telegraph newspaper on Thursday.
According to the media, the parents placed the girl in a foster family in 2014, hoping that it would help her get over difficulties with drugs and truancy.
Thousands of Europeans, including dozens of Swedes, have left their homes to join Daesh.
Daesh, notorious for documented human rights abuses, came to prominence in 2012 as it seized lands from Syrian government forces. The jihadist group has declared a caliphate in the parts of Syria and Iraq it has occupied since 2014.
