Deported by Turkey in 2016, German woman arrested for Daesh links


Two years after Turkey deported her, Germany has arrested 27-year-old Jennifer W. for her connections to the Daesh terrorist group. According to the German news agency dpa, the German federal prosecutor's office said yesterday that she was arrested on suspicion of working for Daesh's "morality police" in Iraq.

The arrest took place on Friday in Bavaria's Swabia region according to reports, which also stated that her apartment was searched for evidence. The woman allegedly left Germany to join Daesh in Iraq between September 2014 and early 2016, the prosecutor's office said in a statement. During that time, she was working for Daesh's so called morality police, enforcing the terrorist group's strict dress codes and codes of conduct for women, prosecutors said.

In 2016, Jennifer W. was arrested during a visit to Turkey and subsequently deported to Germany. A spokeswoman for the prosecutor's office said that it took investigators more than two years to build a case against her.

Turkey, which shares a border with Iraq and Syria, two countries where the terrorist group rose to prominence amid regional turmoil, has been at the forefront of efforts to contain Daesh, which has launched a string of attacks in the country over the past three years. The country has deported more than 3,290 of Daesh's foreign recruits from 95 countries and arrested thousands of members of the terrorist group in continuous operations. As Daesh emerged amid a conflict in Syria that made its borders insecure, Turkey warned against a flow of foreign fighters into the country.

Ankara has repeatedly called for a better cooperation with security services of European countries to stop the flow while it was revealed that several suspects involved in Daesh attacks across Europe were found to be deported by Turkey earlier. For instance, Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, one of the bombers involved in the 2016 Brussels bombings, was deported by Turkey in 2015 and Belgium had been warned about the potential threat he posed.