American girl whose mother died after joining Isis rescued from Syria

An American girl whose mother fled the US to join Isis has been rescued and is awaiting approval to return to the country after her parents were killed living under the terror group, a report has said.

According to BuzzFeed, the eight-year-old girl, who grew up under ISIS control, was born on 8 December 2012, in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Her mother, Ariel Bradley, was reported to have been a US citizen who grew up as an evangelical Christian before converting to Islam and marrying the girl’s father, Yasin Mohamad, in 2011.

According to the outlet, when Bradley became pregnant, she returned to the US to give birth in her hometown before returning to Sweden where she had been living with Mohamad.

Buzzfeed previously ran a profile on Bradley in 2015 in which friends revealed that she often changed her personality to fit in with her relationships.

“The thing about Ariel that was just so weird was that she had such a clearly segmented life,” an anonymous former friend told the outlet.

They added: “It was like, when I first met her she was a Christian, and then she was a socialist, and then she was an atheist, and then a Muslim.

“It seemed like whatever guy she was with, she would just crawl into his skin and kind of become him.”

Around 2014 the family appeared to have traveled to the Middle East and joined the terrorist organisation Isis.

Buzzfeed reports that the mother’s social media posts between January and July in 2015 revealed an insight into the life of her young family as part of a terrorist organisation.

“Turn around & my daughter is covered in white. Never leave baby powder at eye level of a 2-year-old,” she purportedly wrote in a tweet.

Information provided by a Canadian source to Buzzfeed suggested that Bradley and a second child she gave birth to while living in al-Bab, died in a coalition airstrike on 29 November 2018.

On 17 July, the eight-year-old girl was rescued from a detention camp and is waiting at a rehabilitation center in northeast Syria for the US government to certify her citizenship.

The Kurdish-led detention camps are said to hold tens of thousands of people including women and children, who are linked to Isis.

The Canadian source told Buzzfeed that the young girl was made to wear a head-to-toe veil only exposing her eyes as a “disguise” to hide the American girl from the Kurdish guards.

“They knew the camp authorities were always searching for orphans,” the Canadian woman, who joined the terrorist group in 2014 but has since renounced the organisation, told Buzzfeed.

“Children in the camps have the worst start to life,” the Canadian woman, who chose to remain anonymous out of fear for her safety, told the outlet.

“They are already traumatised by losing one or more parents and growing up around violence, poverty, and misery. They deal with constant danger, lack of food, lack of education, and their lives are simply going to waste.”

To be able to return to the US, where her maternal grandparents reside, the child will have to undergo DNA testing, to determine her citizenship status among other formal procedures.

The State Department told BuzzFeed News: “The United States has repatriated 12 adult US citizens and 16 US citizen minors from Syria and Iraq. 

“Of the adults, the Department of Justice has charged ten with federal criminal charges. We have no comment on specific numbers of US citizens remaining in facilities in Northeast Syria.”