They are the newly minted Australian 'war widows' of the deadly ISIS cult which is luring men from around the country into its lethal battle against the west.

 

The news that Sydney ISIS recruits Khaled Sharrouf and Mohamed Elomar have died fighting for the ISIS cause in Iraq has rendered three Australian women widows, two to the same man.

 

Zaynab Sharrouf is the 15-year-old daughter of former Sydney thug for hire and convicted terrorist Khaled Sharrouf who allowed her to marry at the age of 14 to his jihadi friend, Mohamed Elomar.

 

Fatima Elomar  is the first wife and now widow to 31-year-old Elomar and mother of his four children.

 

Tara Nettleton is the widow of Khaled Sharrouf and mother to his five children, who are now all stranded in Syria.

 

Reports from the Middle East say Khaled Sharrouf and Mohamed Elomar were both killed in a drone strike while fighting with ISIS recruits in the Iraqi town of Mosul. Elomar's remains have been found, while Sharrouf's body is said to be missing.

 

Late last month, Ms Nettleton was desperate to return to Australia with her children after finding life in Syria unbearable,Fairfax News reported. 

 

It is unsure whether this may have coincided with her husband's departure from Syria for Iraq. Ms Nettleton could face charges on return for engaging in foreign hostilities.

 

Mohamed Elomar's 'first widow', Fatima Elomar is due to face trial in November this year on foreign incursion charges allegedly committed when she was trying to take her children out of the country to join him in Syria. 

 

Teenager Zaynab Sharrouf has possibly become Australia's youngest 'war widow', who now is both mourning the death of her father and the husband she married as a child bride.

 

She is said to have married Mohamed Elomar with her father's blessing several months ago at the age of 14 years.

 

Zaynab,  who just over a year ago was posting love hearts about American pop idols on her social media account, recently replaced the symbol on kik.com with a love heart symbol and the words 'I love my hubby'.

 

Following reports of Zaynab's marriage to Mohamed Elomar - who is more than twice the young girl's age - she changed her social media handle just two months ago to 'In the hearts of Green Birds'.

 

The book title 'In the hearts of green birds' is a foundational text in Islamist literature which focuses on the deaths of foreign Muslims who had gone to Bosnia and Herzegovina to serve as fighters, and describes their deaths as that of martyrs. 

 

Around a month ago, she shortened her kik handle to just 'green birds' and included the love hearts image with 'I  love my hubby'. 

 

The former Sydney teenager's alleged account on Kik.com, had changed earlier this year to 'Soldier of Allah' and was illustrated with two guns and a knife as a type of coat of arms.

 

Photographs of three women in black hijabs posted on the site are believed to be photographs of Zaynab and her relatives, perhaps including her mother, Tara Nettleton. 

 

For Zaynab Sharrouf, the fledgling female jihadist and new teenage widow, life is a world away from the girl who only last year declared she loved 'The Walking Dead, 'celebrities' as well as 'jewellery and phone cover shops'. 

 

As a 13-year-old who in February last year had just been uprooted from a comfortable life in the Sydney suburbs to war-torn northern Syria, Zaynab Sharrouf sounded like a typical young teen, dreaming about romance with pop stars like Mahone and Justin Bieber. 

 

The eldest of the five children of one-time western Sydney schoolgirl Tara Nettleton and terrorist and thug-for-hire Sharrouf still appeared relatively normal in the months following her parents' decision to relocate the family to Syria while Sharrouf fought with ISIS extremists.

 

But then significant changes seemed to emerge in the young girl who in May last year was musing online about her favourite thing to do in summer being 'to spend time with my family on the beach' and who said her 'perfect honeymoon destination' would be the Queensland resort, Hamilton Island.

 

Following her apparent marriage earlier this year to Mohamed Elomar, who was 17 years her senior, Zaynab Sharrouf seemed preoccupied with the ISIS fight and radical Islam.

 

If strident online posts about ISIS and Allah made three months ago are genuine, it was a relatively short conversion to Islamic extremism for the young teenager.

 

Zaynab was born around the time of the Sydney 2000 Olympics to Tara Nettleton, herself only a teenager, and Sharrouf who had become a couple after meeting at Chester Hill High School in western Sydney.

 

Nettleton would eventually have another daughter and three sons to Sharrouf, but her conversion to Islam was one of the factors which eventually led to her estrangement from her father, Sydney truck driver Peter Nettleton.

 

Her growing young family retained some semblance of normality and she kept close ties with her mother, Karen.

 

Karen Nettleton was reported to have been negotiating with her daughter in May this year to return home, after Tara Nettleton had allegedly tired of life in Syria. It is not known whether this was after her husband had gone off with Mohamed Elomar to fight in Iraq.  

 

Karen Nettleton helped her daughter raise her young family after Sharrouf was imprisoned for three years and 11 months.

 

Sharrouf had pleaded guilty to having a minor role in a 2005 plot to carry out a terrorist attack on Sydney which involved Mohamed Elomar's uncle, Mohammad Ali Elomar. He was released in 2009 and Tara gave birth to two more sons

 

Nettleton and Sharrouf's eldest son - the same boy who was later to pose in Syria with two severed heads under his father's Facebook post 'That's my boy - attended Rissalah College in Lakemba, in western Sydney. 

 

Between 2009 and his departure to Syria, Khaled Sharrouf is said to have worked as an enforcer in the building industry.

 

His found his mother-in-law, Karen, a job as as an accounts payable clerk for a company linked to controversial construction boss George Alex.

 

Although Sharrouf's passport was confiscated and he had been placed on an international watch list, he managed to skip Australia for Syria in December 2013. 

 

Two months later, Tara Nettleton quietly left the country with their five children. When Mohamed Elomar's first wife tried to do the same in May last year, she was arrested at the airport with her four children.

 

Zaynab and her younger sister, who is believed to be aged 11 years old, became very active on several social media sites in their early days in their new Syrian home, said to be in the northern town of Raqqa, which was overtaken by ISIS.

 

Her early posts on a social media site popular with teens, revealed her favourite colour was pink, she was addicted to her iPad and wanted a pink Lamborghini.

 

She claimed her favourite actor was Sandra Bullock and repeatedly said she loved riding horses, a pastime she is believed to have done while visiting her maternal grandmother on the NSW central coast.

 

She also said she wished to learn Spanish, liked cooking pancakes and was concerned about air pollution and that if 'we don't ,make an improvement in out planet. We will die'.

 

Her younger sister loved basketball and hanging out with her cousins. Zaynab made a home movie with happy pictures of herself and her siblings and their cousins.

 

But Zaynab also liked a photo-shopped image posted by her father online of the World Trade Centre in flames with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, militant Islamist and late founder of al-Qaeda in Iraq.

 

Sharrouf captioned the image with the post: 'September 11 is the best day of my life. Our brothers gave there life to establish the deen of Allah on earth and they fulfilled what is mandatory on every Muslim to terrorise the enemy of Allah'.

 

Meanwhile both Khaled Sharrouf and Mohamed Elomar had posted pictures online of themselves in Syria, Elomar posing with two severed heads.

 

Less than a year later, 14-year-old Zaynab has also begun posting on social media about 'Deen', which means 'religious wisdom'. 

 

She describes herself on her latest Twitter account as 'From the land down under, to a Muhajirah in the land of Khalifah'. (Muhajirah loosely means woman who goes to a place for the sake of Allah).

 

The description also says 'Zawji Abu Hafs al australi'. Zawji is Arabic for 'my husband' and 'Abu hafs al Australi' is the ISIS name adopted by Mohamed Elomar in Syria.

 

Zaynab's Twitter name has changed to to 'Umm Hafs'. In her Twitter photo, five women draped in black cloaks pose with Kalashnikov rifles and a white BMW. Zaynab is reportedly the shorter female in the middle.

 

On another social media site under the handle 'Soldier of Allah' she may be the middle female of three women wearing dark niqabs.

 

Next to her 'Soldier of Allah' name are two revolvers and a large knife. Her talk of celebrities and teenybopper crushes has given way to jihad speak and posts with sayings 'of the prophet'.

 

On March 19 she retweeted  a poster which read, 'I am not a extremist I just follow the Deen'.

 

On March 21 she tweeted a pictured of her youngest brother with another young boy posing before the ISIS flag and two Kalashnikovs with the words, 'Young cubs of ISIS, may Allah (swt) protect them from all evil'.

 

A tweet on the same day featuring only the younger boy says 'From Yezidi to ISIS <3', which seems to confirm he is a captive from the Yezidi, an ethnic minority with unique religious beliefs who were targeted by al-Qaeda and now by ISIS in Syria.

 

Earlier this year, Yezidi women told ABC news that Khaled Sharrouf and Mohamed Elomar had raped, starved and enslaved women and that their children had complained about being in Syria.

 

One of the women said Sharrouf had told them 'that he was tortured in jail and given medicine that made him almost mad. He said, "When I get angry, I could kill anyone. I've got no mercy or kindness in my heart".'

 

The women also said Sharrouf's children had been 'treating us badly as well and they had knives and cellphones, saying that they will take videos while killing us because we follow a different religion'.

 

The news of her purported marriage to Mohamed Elomar, who is 17 years Zaynab's senior emerged in March, as the 14-year-old was retweeting messages about polygamy.

 

She retweeted a tweet saying, 'Wallahi jealousy is nothing to be ashamed of. It's good and natural and I guarantee all of you girls will change after marriage'.

 

Another retweet said, ''Now I'm not condemning polygamy in the least nor am I against it at all, I'm just telling you, every wife is a jealous wife.'

 

Mohamed Elomar's first wife, Fatima, the mother of his four young children, is on bail in Sydney as she faces trial late this year on charges under the Crimes (Foreign Incursions and Recruitment) Act of supporting incursions into a foreign state with the intention of engaging in hostile activities,

 

Ms Elomar was arrested by counter-terrorism detectives in May last year as she tried to board a flight to Malaysia with her children, allegedly to take the same route to Syria as Tara Nettleton had done just a few months earlier with her five children including daughter Zaynab.

 

 

Police say Ms Elomar was carrying cash and supplies, including camouflage gear, GPS watches, money and some medical supplies on behalf of her husband, Mohamed.