BORAS: A teenage girl rescued from the Islamic State last week by Kurdish special forces has returned to Sweden, the country’s Foreign Ministry said on Friday.
The girl, Marilyn Nevalainen, who is now 16, left for Syria last year, traveling on trains and buses with her boyfriend, then 19, a Muslim she had met in Sweden. She eventually reached the Islamic State-controlled city ofMosul, in Iraq.
“We can confirm that a Swedish minor is back in Sweden,” Veronica Nordlund, a spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry, said. “Her return was brought about by a collaboration with various agencies in Sweden,” she added, declining to comment further.
Neither the Foreign Ministry nor the Swedish police said where Ms. Nevalainen was staying or whether she was in protective custody, but Thomas Strand, an official with the social services office in the municipality of Mark, where she lived before leaving the country, said that in such cases a minor would usually be held for questioning by the police.
Before leaving Sweden, Ms. Nevalainen lived with a foster family in Mark, a town in the snow-sprinkled flatlands of southwestern Sweden. By her own account, given in an interview with the Kurdish television network K24, she had followed her boyfriend, who had become radicalized, to Syria. The boyfriend has not been publicly identified.
Ms. Nevalainen was pregnant when she left for Iraq, according to a Swedish radio reporter, but the status of her child was unclear. Ms. Nordlund said she could not comment on whether the baby had been rescued.
In the Kurdish television interview, Ms. Nevalainen thanked the Kurds and said that life in the Islamic State had turned out to be “really hard.” After being given a phone, she had called her mother and said she wanted to come home, setting in motion the events that led to her rescue.
