Mother kidnaps her 2 children to join Jihadists in Syria

oge okonkwo

March 16, 2015 6:16 PM

Father of the missing boy and girl had named his children as Luca, seven, and his sister Aysha, eight, and said they had been taken without his consent

A Dutch woman has kidnapped two of her four children and taken them to join Islamic State militants in Syria.

The yet-to-be named 32-year-old Chechen national had been living in Maastricht in the southern Netherlands before taking her young son and daughter to ISIS' de facto capital Raqqa, Daily Mail reports.

Father of the missing boy and girl had named his children as Luca, seven, and his sister Aysha, eight, and said they had been taken without his consent.

The woman's two other children are believed to have been handed over to a relative before she left to join the terror group.

The Dutch prosecution's office has confirmed that the missing woman fled the Netherlands with two of her children last October.

Reports say it is the first known instance of children in the Netherlands being abducted and taken to join ISIS.

According to the Dutch newspaper De Limburger, the children's father had previously reported his estranged wife to the police because he was concerned she was planning to travel to Syria.

Officers are said to have questioned the woman several times but she denied having intentions to join ISIS and investigators could find no evidence of concrete travel plans.

Shortly afterwards the woman vanished from Maastricht with two of the children, prompting Dutch officials to launch a major alert, leading to an international arrest warrant being issued.

Despite this the woman later took to Facebook to declare that she and her two children had arrived in the terrorists' de facto capital Raqqa, having used fake passports to travel across Europe.

After making the announcement of their arrival in Raqqa on Facebook last October, nothing has been heard from the woman since.

Dutch officials said they had no way of telling whether the group were still alive, with prosecutor Bart den Hartigh declaring the recovery of the children 'impossible' as the Netherlands has no legal relationship with either the Syrian regime or the terror group that controls the city of Raqqa.

oge okonkwo