US-born girl rescued from Syrian camp after growing up under ISIS

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A US-born 8-year-old girl who grew up with her ISIS parents has been rescued from a Syrian camp — and is now awaiting word to see if she can return to the US, according to a report.

Aminah Mohamad, the daughter of an American woman from Tennessee, had been living under ISIS control since 2014 before being sent to a Kurdish-controlled detention camp where she was rescued July 17, according to Buzzfeed.

On Saturday, she was interviewed by the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism about her life with the terror group, ex-diplomat Peter Galbraith told the outlet.

“She clearly self-identified as Amina and talked about her family with deep sadness,” said the rescue group’s director, Anne Speckhard.

Speckhard said the girl “doesn’t have a clear context as to where she is from,” and said Aminah needs “a safe, predictable and loving environment to replace the traumatic one (she) lived under.”

The girl’s rescue was made possible by Galbraith and a Canadian woman who met her mother while living under ISIS, which she has since denounced.

“Children in the camps have the worst start to life,” the woman, whose name was withheld by Buzzfeed, said. “They are already traumatized by losing one or more parents and growing up around violence, poverty and misery.”

“They deal with constant danger, lack of food, lack of education, and their lives are simply going to waste,” she said.

Aminah’s mother, Ariel Bradley, was an evangelical Christian who converted to Islam and later married Yasin Mohamad, a Swedish Muslim, through an arranged marriage.

The family lived in Sweden but eventually relocated to ISIS-controlled territory in the Middle East, where they lived under the terror group’s rigid guidelines.

According to Buzzfeed, Mohamad was killed in an airstrike in June 2015, and her mother remarried a devout ISIS follower, an Australian named Tareq Kamleh.

When both Bradley and Kamleh were killed in 2018, Aminah was turned over to another of her stepfather’s wives, a Somali woman who remained devoted to the terror group.

Galbraith, who has worked for years to free women and children held in the detention camps, eventually worked with Kurdish sources to free the Canadian woman and, eventually, Aminah and others in the camps.

Galbraith said that, once he learned the 8-year-old was in one of the camps, he “couldn’t just leave her there if it was possible to get her out.”

“This is a part of the world where I’ve worked for decades,” the former diplomat told the outlet. “I have friendships and contacts in a part of the world where relationships are very important.”

The US State Department would not comment on the case or confirm that efforts to get Aminah to her native country were underway.

“My ability to do anything is limited,” Galbraith said. “But I want the people who make the decisions to know where she came from and what she went through.”

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