(Transcript from World News Radio)
Austria is concerned about the fate of two teenage girls who've been missing for nearly a month after disappearing from their homes in a Vienna suburb.
Postings on the girls' social-media web sites suggest they've travelled to Syria to join rebel fighters.
Interpol has joined the search for them.
Kerry Skyring reports from Vienna on the young European Muslims drawn to the conflict in Syria.
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Syria's civil war pitches rebels against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.
The United Nations estimates the death toll in the four year conflict at over 130 thousand and says the war has produced more than four million refugees.
Why then, do two teenage students leave their comfortable life in one of Europe's safest cities for this?
Letters left by Samra Kesinovic, aged 16 and Sabina Selimovic, who's 15, say they are heading for Syria.
Austrian police released the documents which suggest the two are ready to die for Islam.
"We will meet in Paradise", says one note.
The girls come from one of Vienna's working-class suburbs, Favoriten and their teacher Corina Windsperger says she recently counselled one of them about attempts to convert other classmates to Islam.
"And then there was a drawing of weapons, and "Allah is great", that sort of grabbed our attention and so we talked to her."
Both girls are from families who migrated to Austria from Bosnia to escape the ethnic wars there in the early 1990s.
There have been internet postings suggesting they are in a rebel training camp in Syria, but the girl's families have told police they doubt the photo's authenticity.
The family do not want to speak to the media, a neighbour named Dschachar told Austrian state television that in recent months his friend Samra had changed.
"Once we met each other often, outside, but a few months ago that stopped. And then one day I saw her wearing the veil, I could only see her eyes. And at first I didn't know if it was her, and then a friend told me, 'yes that's Samra and so I spoke to her'".
The mosque where friends say Samra and Sabina were recruited for the Syrian war is in Vienna's second district.
Like many in the city it's at the back of an inner courtyard and not visible from the street.
Unlike others, this one is under police observation, because Austria's anti-terrorism unit says it's a meeting point for radicals from Islam's Salafist movement.
Bernard Heinzlmaier is a researcher on Austrian youth culture and has this explanation for the girls' behaviour.
"It means, those who have seen "the truth," they see themselves as extraordinary, unique, and they take up this identity. And we don't just find this in radical Islam - we find it in Catholic sects, we find it in Scientology - so a type of sect into which people withdraw."
Erich, another friend of Samra, knew the 16-year-old was becoming increasingly religious.
"That it's come to this, that she would flee to Syria with her friend. I never thought that would happen."
Austria's interior ministry thinks there are as many as 100 of its nationals fighting in Syria.
To dissuade more from going the government is threatening to strip citizenship from those who fight there.
But legal experts say that would violate human rights conventions and have little impact on young people who want to join a Jihad.
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