German authorities would be extremely foolish to allow Leonora to correct this “mistake.” She joined a group that is avowedly at war with Germany and all of the West. She joined a group that has repeatedly called upon Muslims to murder non-Muslim civilians in Western countries. She claims her husband was just a tech man for ISIS: he “makes technical stuff, computer stuff, repairs computer, mobiles.” But an investigation found that he was “an influential figure among foreign terrorists in Syria.” Leonora’s claims about her husband are reminiscent of post-World War II Germans claiming that they had nothing to do with the Nazis and always hated them; so many Germans made this claim that one would have thought that the Nazis faced massive internal resistance, but they didn’t. ISIS still exists, and still wants non-Muslims in Germany and elsewhere dead. German authorities will allow Leonora to return at their own risk.

“‘Big mistake’: German woman who joined ISIS, asks to go home,” AFP, February 2, 2019:

Baghouz, Syria: Four years after leaving Germany to live under the ISIS group, 19-year-old Leonora has fled the terrorists’ last bastion in eastern Syria and says it’s time to go home.

“I was a little bit naive,” she says in English, wearing a long billowing black robe, and a beige headscarf with white spots….

The young German woman says she first came to Syria aged 15, just two months after converting to Islam.

“After three days, I married my German husband,” she tells AFP, at a screening centre for the displaced run by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces.

Leonora says she became the third wife of German terrorist Martin Lemke, after he travelled to Syria with his first two wives.

ISIS had the year before swept across large swathes of Syria and neighbouring Iraq, declaring a “caliphate” in areas it controlled.

Leonora first lived in the terrorist group’s de-facto Syrian capital of Raqa, but says she was just a housewife.

“I was just at home, in (the) house cooking, cleaning — stuff like this,” says the pale faced German, clutching the youngest of her two children, an infant aged just two weeks….

At first life in Raqa was easy, Leonora says, but that changed when the SDF started advancing against the terrorists, with support from US-led coalition air strikes.

The Kurdish-led SDF overran Raqa in 2017, after years of what residents described as ISIS’s brutal rule, which included public beheading and crucifixions.

“Then they lose Raqa, and we started to change our house every week because they lost every week a city,” she says.

When they came under attack by the Kurdish-led SDF, Leonora says the ISIS fighters left their families to fend for themselves.

“They left the women alone, no food, they don’t care about you,” she says. The enemy was advancing “and you were sitting alone in an empty city with your kids”.

They ended up in a tiny patch on the eastern banks of the Euphrates in Deir Ezzor province.

The SDF have cornered ISIS into a patch of less than four square kilometres in recent days.

‘Big, Big Mistake’

Eventually, she says, she picked up her children, and fled with her husband, and his second wife into SDF-held territory.

US-backed forces detained Lemke on Thursday.

Leonora claims Lemke worked mostly as a technician for ISIS.

“He makes technical stuff, computer stuff, repairs computer, mobiles,” she says.

But investigations published in German newspapers portray Lemke, who is now believed to be 28, as an influential figure among foreign terrorists in Syria….

After four years under a now near-extinct ISIS caliphate, Leonora says she wants to go home.

“I want to go back to Germany to my family, because I want my old life back,” she says.

“Now I know that it was a big, big mistake.”