‘Crack’ Isis fighter pledges to take holy war home to London
A KEEN footballer from London who travelled to Syria to fight with Isis has vowed to return home armed and brandishing the jihadist group’s black flag.
Fabio Pocas, 22, claims to have fought with an Isis ‘‘special forces’’ unit and now acts as a ‘‘military trainer’’ for other jihadist fighters. ‘‘Killing is easy,’’ he said. ‘‘And it’s even easier to kill those who kill Muslims . . . I’m capable of killing anyone who fights against Islam.’’
The Sunday Times last weekend named Pocas as one of five Portuguese immigrants who converted to Islam and were radicalised in east London before waging holy war abroad.
He now uses the name Abdurahman Al Andalus and says he has three wives in Syria, including a teenage jihadist bride from Holland.
He lives in Manbij, an Isiscontrolled town in the north that has been nicknamed ‘‘Little London’’ because of its high number of residents from the British capital.
In an interview with Sabado, a Portuguese news magazine, Pocas, who claims to have played football for the youth academy of Sporting Lisbon, said he intended to return to Europe to continue the jihad.
He said he will come back ‘‘with the flag of tawheed [the black banner associated with Islamists] in one hand and my weapon in the other’’.
His threat comes as Sheikh Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, Isis’s chief spokesman, issued a call for extremists to carry out more terror attacks – similar to the recent Paris atrocities – in ‘‘Europe and the disbelieving West’’.
Adnani warned about to intensify’’.
‘‘What lies ahead will be worse, with Allah’s permission, and more bitter – for you haven’t seen anything from us just yet,’’ he said.
Pocas moved to London in 2012 to further his football career and to study. He went to Syria in October 2013 and initially fought against President Bashar al-Assad’s army in Aleppo. He described the conflict as a ‘‘five-star jihad’’ with militants operating a ‘‘rotation system’’, taking turns to fight on the front line.
He said: ‘‘In the beginning I was a normal soldier. Now I’m a military trainer.’’
He indicated his parents are perplexed by his actions. ‘‘It’s hard to communicate with them. And obviously they don’t understand,’’ he said.
‘‘the
battle
is TWO balloonists crossing the Pacific landed safely off the coast of Mexico yesterday, making history by travelling nearly 7000 miles – farther and longer in a gas balloon than anyone else.
The pilots of the helium-filled Two Eagles – American Troy Bradley, 50, of Albuquerque and Russian Leonid Tiukhtyaev, 58, of Moscow – landed off Baja California, about 300 miles north of Cabo San Lucas. They took off from Saga, Japan, on Monday and spent more than 160 hours in the air.
The trip shattered the previous distance record of more than 5209 miles on Friday and the duration mark of more than 137 hours Saturday, according to the site tracking the voyage. The old distance record was set in 1981 by the Double Eagle V on the only other trans-Pacific balloon crossing. The previous duration record was the 1978 trans-Atlantic crossing by the Double Eagle II.