A Swedish teenager rescued from ISIL fanatics in Iraq has said she was duped into going there by her boyfriend, describing life in the so-called caliphate as “really hard”.

Kurdish special forces recovered the 16-year-old on February 17 in northern Iraq, where she was due to be handed over to the Swedish authorities.

The girl told a Kurdish TV station that she met her boyfriend in Sweden in mid-2014 after dropping out of school.

“First we was good together but then he started to look at the ISIS videos and start speak about them and stuff like that. And I don’t know anything about Islam or ISIS or some things and I do not know what he meant, you know? And then he said he wanted to go to ISIS and I said to him, ‘OK, no problem’, because I didn’t know what ISIS means, what Islam is – nothing.”

After setting off from Sweden in May 2015 the couple crossed from Turkey into Syria. From there, ISIL militants took them to Mosul in neighbouring Iraq where they were put up in a house in Mosul with no electricity or running water.

Comparing life under ISIL to that in Europe, the girl said in the interview: “In Sweden we have everything, and when I was there, we didn’t have anything”.

“I didn’t have any money either – it was a really hard life”, the girl said. “When I had a phone I contacted my Mum and said ‘I want to go home’.”