A 21-year-old woman who left Germany for Syria at the age of 15 before returning in 2020 is to face charges of membership of a terrorist organisation.

The federal prosecutors said this in Karlsruhe on Wednesday.

The woman was alleged to have left for Syria in March 2015 to join the Islamic State, where she became the third wife of a man working for the organisation’s intelligence services.

The woman was also alleged to have been tasked with investigating the wives of Islamic State fighters from the end of 2015, being paid monthly for her work.

She is also alleged to have held a Yezidi woman as slave and to have subsequently sold her.

In the summer of 2017, she fled the northern city of Raqqa along with her husband and their two children, and from 2019 she lived with her children in a refugee camp up to her departure for Germany.

She was detained on arrival in Frankfurt on December 20 last year, before being released a month later.

The woman will also face charges of crimes against humanity and contraventions of weapons legislation.

Investigations have proceeded but no date for a trial has been set.