Please forgive me: IS recruit’s letter to kin

MOSUL: “My dear family, please forgive me,” reads the handwritten letter discarded in the dusty halls of an Islamic State training compound in eastern Mosul.

“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 bomb attack against Iraqi security forces last year.

The letter was written on an IS form marked “Soldiers’ Department, Martyrs’ Brigade” and in an envelope addressed to his parents’ home in western Mosul.

The boy, aged 15 or 16 when he signed up, was one of dozens of young recruits, who passed through the training facility in the past two-to-one-and-a-half years as they prepared to wage jihad. His letter never reached his family. It was left behind with a handful of other bombers’ notes to relatives. These documents were found by Reuters on a trip into eastern Mosul after the army recaptured that area in October last year.