“I’m just devastated,” said the aunt, Monica Mansfield Speelman. “Evidently, she was fighting with opposition forces.”

Speelman said Mansfield, a single mother of an 18-year-old daughter, had converted to Islam about five years ago but that she did not know when her niece had traveled to Syria.

“I didn’t think she would stoop that low to go over there and try to harm anybody,” Speelman said of her niece, who she said had worked at a group home.