German teenager found in Mosul was 'wife of Chechen Isil fighter and killed Iraqi soldiers'

The German teenage girl captured in Mosul was married to a Chechen Islamic State fighter and has admitted to killing Iraqi troops, according to one of the soldiers who arrested her.

Linda Wenzel, 16, who was discovered hiding in a tunnel under Mosul’s Old City last week, is being questioned by American and Iraqi interrogators in Baghdad.

An officer in Iraq’s elite counterrorism unit, who spoke to the Telegraph anonymously as he is not authorised to speak to the press, said she had acted as a sniper for Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil). 

“We found her with a gun in her hand next to her Chechen husband, who was then killed by Iraqi forces in a firefight. She said she had killed a number of our men in the battle," he said. 

“I believe she was a Daesh sniper, but maybe her husband pressured her into it. She looked scared,” he said, using a pejorative Arabic name for the jihadists. 

Vian Dakhil, an Iraqi MP, told the paper Linda was also found near explosives and was "ready to attack the advancing troops."

“She was with other women in that tunnel and all of them were ready to attack in busy streets, just like other ISIS women did before."

More than 20 other foreign women were discovered alongside the schoolgirl, including Russian, Turkish and Canadian.

The officer said she was found with the ID card of a Yazidi woman - thousands of whom were kidnapped by Isil in 2014 - and claimed to be one the missing girls.

However when his unit asked civilians to identify her they shied away. “They looked afraid to answer when we asked them, which made us think she wasn’t a Yazidi.”

Then when one of the troops said a few words in German she responded immediately. 

It is now understood that the Chechen fighter struck up a relationship with Linda online, messaging her in a chatroom and ultimately convincing her to join him in Isil’s so-called caliphate.

Thousands of Chechens travelled to Syria and Iraq, making the majority-Muslim region of Russia one of the biggest exporters of fighters to Isil.

Battled-tested with a reputation for brutality, most became snipers who were sent to the frontline in west Mosul where some of the most fiercest fighting took place.

Linda travelled last year from her home in the small German town of Pulsnitz near Dresden to Istanbul and from there the Syrian border, posing as her mother Katharina.

She grew up in a Protestant family, and had not showed any interest in religion until a few months before her disappearance. In the spring of 2016 she told her parents for the first time that she was interested in Islam.

Friends in Pulsnitz say she converted and started learning Arabic, taking the Koran to school and wearing more conservative clothing.

After she went missing, her mother checked her social media and found a second secret Facebook account which she used to contact jihadists and share messages such as "Pray, the end is approaching".

Ms Dakhil said Linda’s mother has confirmed the girl in custody to be her daughter, but that she would still be made to undergo DNA tests before a decision would be made about whether to return her to Germany. 

Ms Dakhil said she is pushing Iraq to try her as an adult and not to extradite her. 

"Iraq does not have any type of agreement with Germany to exchange terrorists or people whom are held in custody,” she told the Telegraph. “She is a German woman who came to Iraq to kill Iraqis, thus she should be prosecuted here in Iraq."

Baghdad is now in unchartered territory with the mass arrest of Western female suspected Isil members. 

A French woman captured in Mosul with her four young children earlier this month is facing possible prosecution in Iraq for allegedly collaborating with Isil, in a test case for how governments handle families of foreign fighters now that the extremists are in retreat.

The woman's lawyer says the family should be brought to France. But French government spokesman Christophe Castaner said that the mother should be prosecuted in Iraq, saying she was not in the country "for tourism."