EXCLUSIVE: Kurdistan 24 talks to son of French ISIS fighter held in north Syria
“The countries that did… not help us, exactly, but… there’s Turkey,” adding, “the road was very easy—no obstacles; nothing—” to cross. “In Turkey, no one talked to you or paid attention. When we crossed the border, no one said anything. There were just specific hours when we could not cross.”
The family was in al-Bab at first but then left for Manbij, from where they would eventually flee when the city came under siege by the SDF in mid-2016. Then, he explained, “my dad made us leave with my mom, my sisters, [and] my little brother and go to Raqqa.”
In Raqqa, the teen’s father sent him to the mosques “to learn the Quran, to learn Arabic, and, how do you say, sessions.” Eventually, Raqqa—which was the Islamic State's capital in Syria—would be the target of a series of campaigns by various entities in the country, with the SDF finally delivering a victory in October 2017 in a five-month-long operation.
The prisoner’s family then moved to Jazira where he was “lightly injured,” the circumstances of which he did not explain. His father, however, had sustained severe wounds. They then traveled to Baghouz, where “my dad was killed, my two little sisters were killed. My mom and my little brother were injured.”
During the interview, the prisoner’s leg was visibly deformed, apparently from the wounds he mentioned.
At this point, he continued, the SDF and the international coalition created a safe corridor for “caliphate” deserters to turn themselves in. “At that moment, I decided that’s it, I don’t have anything to do here anymore… so we took it and it led us to this prison.”
“Many people [in the detention center] have changed their way of thinking,” without “the same thoughts we had when we were in the Caliphate,” the prisoner claimed, adding that most of them “would not go back” to it.
He noted how some people, like wives of men who joined the Islamic State or their children, “were forced to come here.” “Some regret it. I regret what happened and we’ll see what they do with us.”
According to various media reports on the situation and to Kurdistan 24 interviews with a number of women who previously joined their spouses in their journey to join the Islamic State, many seem to have been complicit in crimes committed by the group, partaking in the crackdown on dissent within the terrorist organization's territories and enforcing its brutal religious law.
In terms of fighting, the prisoner said had not encountered much. “I did not see anything. I only saw the airstrikes. What I heard from the Kurds and the SDF was just gunfire and mortars—those things.”
“But most of what happened to us inside the Caliphate was the airstrikes,” he said. “That’s what terrorized us the most.”
Editing by John J. Catherine
