Twenty-six foreigners, including two men, eight children and 16 women were arrested from the city of Mosul and taken to Baghdad by Iraqi authorities, three Iraqi intelligence officials told The Associated Press (AP) on Saturday.

The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity as the information is not yet public, revealed that some of the arrested foreigners are from Chechnya, and the women are from Russia, Iran, Syria, France, Belgium and Germany.

Among them are four German women of Moroccan, Algerian, Chechen and German descent. The Moroccan woman has a child. The arrests were made about 10 days ago.

The officials said that the women had allegedly been working with the militant Islamic State (IS) group in the police force. Their husbands were IS fighters but their fates are not known.

According to official sources, the French and German embassies have visited the women. They expect that the children will be handed over to the countries they belong to and the women will be tried on terrorism charges.

A 16-year-old German girl who had run away from home shortly after converting to Islam was also found in Iraq.

Prosecutor Lorenz Haase from the eastern German city of Dresden said the teenager, only identified as Linda W in line with German privacy laws, is getting consular assistance from the German Embassy in Iraq.

Haase did not confirm media reports on Saturday that the teenager from Pulsnitz in eastern Germany had been fighting for IS in Mosul.

He told AP, “Our information ends with the girl's arrival in Istanbul about a year ago.”

Several female foreign IS fighters have also been detained by Iraq's military in Mosul recently, but Haase couldn't confirm that the German girl was part of that group.