BARCELONA, Spain – A 14-year-old Spanish Muslim girl was sent to a juvenile detention center after confessing she was headed for the Middle East to join the jihad.
The girl, who has not been publicly identified, was arrested last Saturday in the North African Spanish enclave of Melilla together with 19-year-old Fauzia Allal Mohamed, with whom she said she was going to join jihadists fighting in Syria and Iraq.
The El Pais newspaper reported Tuesday that while the younger girl was sent to the juvenile center, the older woman was released on bail after denying any links to jihadists.
It was the first time Spanish security forces had arrested women trying to join the jihad. Both appeared separately before Supreme Court judges on Tuesday. They were arrested while trying to cross into Morocco, en route to Iraq.
The 14-year-old, who according to her family was just an “average” schoolgirl until four months ago, started to become radicalized by the sermons of an imam at a mosque in her town, El Pais quoted sources as saying.
The girl has also told Spanish authorities that she was not the only youngster to travel from Morocco to war zones. Other girls, whose identities she has given, were to travel with her.
She said she had contacted Mohamed for help to cross the border to Morocco. Mohamed, who denied any links to terrorism, was released on bail and will have to report every week to the nearest court to her home. She is also not allowed to travel outside Spain.
The two were arrested as they were trying to cross the border into Morocco to contact the cell that had recruited them. Their aim was to be taken to a border area between Syria and Iraq to join the Islamic State (IS/ISIS), according to the Spanish Interior Ministry.
El Pais quoted police sources as saying the younger girl is from the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. She reportedly disappeared a few days ago from her home and the family had contacted police, saying they were afraid she had joined a radical Islamic organization.
Over the past few months, Spain has arrested members of three jihadist recruitment cells in Ceuta and Melilla. Seven men from Ceuta have been reported killed in Syria fighting with the Islamists.
Estimates suggest that thousands of people, mostly young men, have traveled from Western countries to join rebels in Iraq and Syria. Recent studies say about 10,000 foreign fighters, some 3,000 of them from Western countries, are fighting with the jihadists.
The leader of the Syrian Kurds Salih Muslim warned recently during a visit to Barcelona that Europe is breeding jihadists who are fighting in their thousands in Syria.
“We have 4,000 people from Europe joining the fighting against us. There is something wrong in Europe which is producing people with this mentality,” Muslim said. “The Europeans should sit and think about what they should do.”
IS, formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, began by seizing territory in Syria as part of its fight against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. But since June it has captured vast territories across northern Iraq, declaring a cross-border Islamic Caliphate, with Mosul as the capital.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, IS leader and self-proclaimed Caliph of the Muslim world, has called on Muslims across the globe to join its jihad.
The group has masterminded an international campaign through the Internet to attract foreign fighters. Women mainly join the group as wives of the jihadists and for minor jobs like cooking or caring for children.
El Pais said police suspected the two girls had been radicalized through the Internet forums.
“They were going to a certain death,” the newspaper quoted a police official as saying.
Many of the radicalized Muslim women have been inspired by 53-year-old Moroccan Fatiha Mejjati, nicknamed the ”black widow,” who had been in Afghanistan with her husband and two children during the 9/11 attacks in the United States.
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