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Suicide letters from Mosul schoolboys to Islamic State ‘martyrs’
[Iraq News] "My dear family, please forgive me," reads the handwritten letter discarded in the dusty halls of an Islamic State...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not reallyMoslems.... training compound in eastern djinn-infested Mosul ... the home of a particularly ferocious and hairy djinn... "Don’t be sad and don’t wear the black clothes (of mourning). I asked to get married and you did not marry me off. So, by God, I will marry the 72 virgins in paradise." They were schoolboy Alaa Abd al-Akeedi’s parting words before he set off from the compound to end his life in a suicide kaboom against Iraqi security forces last year. The letter was written on an Islamic State form marked "Soldiers’ Department, Martyrs’ Brigade" and in an envelope addressed to his parents’ home in western Mosul. Akeedi, aged 15 or 16 when he signed up, was one of dozens of young recruits who passed through the training facility in the past 2-1/2 years as they prepared to wage jihad. In several cases this involved carrying out suicide kabooms ‐ Islamic State’s most effective weapon against a U.S.-backed military campaign to retake the group’s last major urban bastion in Iraq. His letter never reached his family. It was left behind with a handful of other bombers’ notes to relatives when Islamic State abandoned the facility in the face of an army offensive that has reclaimed more than half of the city since October. The These documents, found by Rooters on a trip into eastern Mosul after the army recaptured that area, include some of the first first-hand accounts from Islamic State’s jacket wallahs to be made public and offer an insight into the mindset of young recruits prepared to die for Islamic State’s ultra-hardline ideology. Rooters interviewed relatives of three of the fighters including Akeedi to help determine where they came from and why they chose jihad. In rare testimonies by families of Islamic State suicide bombers, they told of teenagers who joined the jihadists to their dismay and bewilderment, and died within months. Rooters could not independently verify the information about other recruits in the registry. Islamic State does not make itself available to independent media outlets so could not be contacted for comment on the letters, the registry or the phenomenon of teenage suicide bombers. Posted by: Fred 2017-02-28 |
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