CARDIFF ISIS RECRUIT ‘FOUND IN SYRIA’
A MAN who travelled to Syria as a teenager to join Islamic State has been traced to a prison in the north of the country.
Aseel Muthana worked selling ice cream in Cardiff before leaving his family and travelling to Syria in 2014, then aged 17.
He followed his brother, Nasser Muthana, and a friend, Reyaad Khan, who joined the brutal extremist group months earlier. They became some of Britain’s most high-profile Islamic State members.
Earlier this year, their father, Ahmed, told WalesOnline he did not know if his sons were alive or dead.
Muthana had been presumed dead, but was recently traced to a prison in northern Syria, where he told ITV News he missed his mother, his old life in Cardiff, and wants to return home.
When told her now 22-year-old son was alive, Muthana’s mother Umm Amin said she felt “extreme joy” and urged authorities to allow him to come home.
Inside the prison, Muthana told ITV News he was lured into going to Syria by propaganda that claimed he would be helping Syria’s poor by fighting on the side of Islamic State.
“Back then when I first came to Isis, you have to understand I came way before the caliphate was pronounced,” he said.
“Before all of these beheading videos, before all of the burnings happened, before any of that stuff.
“We came when Isis propaganda and Isis media was all about helping the poor, helping the Syrian people.
“We stuck with the people you know from the UK and from Wales .... the Welsh guys... me and my brother and Reyaad [Khan].”
A wave of Islamic State beheadings which shocked the world began in 2014. Their victims included American journalists, British aid workers and Syrian, Kurdish and Lebanese soldiers.
Muthana is being held at a secret prison in Syria where 5,000 inmates are kept in cells. Senior leaders of the group are among the inmates of the prison.
Speaking at the family’s home in Cardiff, Umm Amin told ITV News she thought finding her 22-year-old son would be impossible, and asked after her son Nasser who is believed to have been killed.
Khan is also believed to have been killed in a drone attack.
“I felt extreme joy that my boy is alive and I felt extreme sadness that my boy is in this place [prison] that I did not wish to see him there,” she said.
In a statement, she urged authorities to allow her son to return home.
She said: “To whom it may concern, and to those with compassionate hearts.
“We are not against you (Kurdish authorities) but I am writing with the care that a mother has for her children, my husband is in hospital sick with the weight of worry.
“My little boy went seduced [by Isis] and brainwashed with ideas that were not his. So that he doesn’t know what is right and what is wrong, dominated and led by his emotions.
“My boy was gentle and merciful and didn’t know violence and harshness. I appeal to you.
“I appeal and ask you for forgiveness and safety from those who destroyed his childhood and youth by taking the swiftest measures to bring him to his father and mother’s bosom who longs to see him. Have compassion for our situation.”
Earlier this year, WalesOnline spoke with Nasser and Aseel’s father Ahmed, who said his sons were paid “good money” and each became a father after marrying fellow Isis recruits.
Dad-of-four Ahmed said: “They thought if they went there it would be a paradise but they found it is a hell.
“Living in hell - but by force. “They used to say ‘We are okay’. The older one had two sons. The younger one had one son and his wife was pregnant.
“I asked them to see pictures and they refused because they said the leader of IS has been extremely instructive not to even phone. But they used to phone us behind their backs.
“They (IS) paid them good money. They gave them a separate house each and they forced them to marry and said if you are with us you have to be married.”