‘Father’s daughter’ became a terrorist / Germany that joined ISIS when it was 15 years old goes to war crimes trial (photos)

Leonora Messing was just 15 years old when she left her home in Sangerhausen, Germany, to become a high-profile ‘jihadist bride’.

Messing had gone to Raqqa, then the de facto capital of ISIS in Syria, before marrying her extremist compatriot Martin Lemke, also a fighter known by the nickname Nihad Abu Yasir.

Her father, 49-year-old Maik Messing, expressed shock at her daughter’s decision to join the terror group when she wrote his book ‘Leonora’ in 2019.

He revealed that a few days after her disappearance he received a text message stating that Leonora ‘had chosen Allah and Islam’ therefore had gone to the Caliphate.

Messing, now 21, has appeared in court in the eastern German city of Halle as a suspect along with her ISIS husband, for the enslavement of a Yazidi woman in 2015 in Syria.

The closed-door trial is expected to last until May and will also try Messing on charges of membership in a terrorist organization and violations of gun laws.

Her case has turned into a national debate over the possibility of how a teenage girl from a small German town becomes a tool of Islamist causes.

Prosecutors say Messing is part of a human trafficking group on behalf of the Islamic State, after she and her husband bought a 33-year-old Yazidi woman whom they later sold for $ 800.

According to reports, upon arrival in Syria, Leonora became an ‘influential bride’ of ISIS and controlled other women during Islamic lessons and reported to their husbands how they were stabilizing in the new life.

But she still kept in touch with the family and even told her father about the gold jewelry she had received for the wedding. She had told her parents about the war in Syria and about everyday life such as how she had learned to bake bread.

Leonora later gave birth to two daughters, but was stopped and placed in a Kurdish girls’ camp after the fall of ISIS in Syria.

Leonora said she tried to escape twice but was caught by her husband before “realizing she had made a mistake”, and prayed to return to her old life in Germany.

It was repatriated to one of Germany’s four such operations in 2020, despite European states’ reluctance to return terrorists.

Messing’s father, a baker from the German village of Breitenbach, learned that his daughter had only converted to Islam when she opened her old computer.

She was a good student, ‘Messing told the regional MDR network in 2019.

“She went to nursing homes to help the elderly and attended local carnivals.

But Messing had lived a double life as without her parents’ knowledge she visited the Frankfurt mosque and later became one of about 1,150 Islamist Germans who fled to Syria and Iraq in 2011.

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