The Islamic
State has “many ways of gaining people’s goodwill and support” — including
hallucinatory drugs and week-long marriage contracts — but it’s only a
matter of time before new recruits are forced to behead their friends and rape
scores of non-Muslim women, an ISIS defector says.
Speaking in an interview
with the Independent, a 33-year-old former jihadi, known as Hamza, candidly
described his time with the brutal terrorist group and explained how he
deserted and fled Iraq in January.
“The executions,
or more horribly the beheadings, as well as the raping of the non-Muslim girls
… These scenes terrified me,” he told the British newspaper. “I imagined myself
being caught up in these shootings, executions, beheadings and raping, if I stayed
where I was.”
Being a member
of the Islamic State was just too brutal for Hamza, who is from the Iraqi city
of Fallujah. He originally became an ISIS fighter last year when he was
attracted to the religious appeal and benefits.
“They were kind
to people in general and did not force them to join their military service,” he
recalled of the Islamic State recruiters. “I was paid ($245) a month in
addition to many privileges, including food, fuel, and more recently, access to
the Internet … They had many ways of gaining people’s goodwill and support …
they were giving small lectures and sermons after prayers … about how to reform
and improve society, using the Quran and Hadith [traditional Islamic teachings]
to support their arguments. This was like some kind of brainwashing.”
But Hamza never
thought he would actually have to kill people, he said.
“I don’t like
Shia, but when it comes to killing them, I was shocked,” he told the
Independent. “Although they were showing us videos of Shia militias killing
Sunni people, we were troubled when we attended real executions.”
Hamza claims he
ultimately left ISIS after they asked him to take part in the execution of
Sunni hostages, some of whom he knew.
“I couldn’t
endure what we were going to do,” he said. “The commander said: ‘I will give
you another chance later. For now we have mujahideen [jihadis] to carry out the
killing.’”
Hamza says
another reason he defected was because he couldn’t stand by and watch as the
sex-crazed extremists raped countless numbers of captured women.
“As for the
raping, and the way different men marry by turn the same woman over a period of
time, this is not humane,” he told the Independent. “There were some Tunisian
Muslim girls who came from Syria. Those Muslim girls were sleeping with some commanders
under a marriage contract for a week only and then they were divorced and
married to another one. I asked one of them how she had come to be in Syria and
she answered that she had traveled first to Turkey and then across the
Turkish-Syrian border.”
Three teenage
schoolgirls from the UK made headlines recently after they abandoned their
families to join ISIS. The trio also traveled to Turkey before venturing into
Syria and could conceivably suffer the same fates as the women described by
Hamza, according to the Independent.
Shortly after
Hamza refused to execute the Sunni prisoners because he knew them, some of the
ISIS militants offered him and some others 13 captured Yazidi girls for sex, he
said. This — combined with the attempt to make him kill his own friends
— drove him over the edge and convinced him to flee.
“At the
beginning, I thought they were fighting for Allah, but later I discovered they
are far from the principles of Islam,” Hamza explained. “I know that some
fighters were taking hallucinatory drugs; others were obsessed with sex.”
“I left them
because I was afraid and deeply troubled by this horrible situation,” he added.
“The justice they were calling for when they first arrived in Fallujah turned
out to be only words.”
Source: NY Post
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