From schoolboys to Islamic State ‘martyrs’
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.
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 two and a half years as they prepare to carry out attacks.
In several cases this involved suicide missions – IS’ most effective weapon against a US-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 IS abandoned the facility in the face of an army offensive.
The militants also left a handwrit- ten registry containing the personal details of about 50 recruits. Not all entries had years of birth, and only about a dozen had photographs attached, but many recruits were in their teens or early 20s.
Another recruit of the same age, Atheer Ali, is listed in the registry beside a passport-sized photo showing a boy with bushy eyebrows and large brown eyes.
His father, Abu Amir, said Atheer was shy and slim, lacking a fighter’s mentality or build.
So the father was horrified when one day in early 2015 Atheer didn’t come home from school but ran off with seven classmates to join IS.
When Abu went to the militants’ offices across the city to track down his son, they threatened to jail him. He never saw his son alive again.
A few months later, three IS fighters pulled up at Abu’s house in a pickup truck and handed him a scrap of paper with his son’s name on it. He was dead.
Abu retrieved the body from the morgue.
His hair had grown long but he was still too young for facial hair. Shrapnel was lodged in his arms and chest.
“Even now I’m still astounded. I don’t know how they convinced him to join,” said Abu.
“I’m just glad we could bury him and put this whole thing to rest.”— AFP