American IS Fighter: I Made a Bad Decision
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

IRBIL, Iraq — The American Islamic State group fighter who handed himself over to Kurdish forces in northern Iraq earlier this week said he made “a bad decision” in joining the IS, according to a heavily edited interview he gave to an Iraqi Kurdish television station.

In the TV interview, which aired late Thursday night, Mohamad Jamal Khweis, 26, from Alexandria, Virginia detailed his weeks-long journey from the United States to London, Amsterdam, Turkey, through Syria and finally to the IS-controlled Iraqi city of Mosul.

Once in Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city that was captured by the Islamic State in the summer of 2014, Khweis was moved into a house with dozens of other foreign fighters, he told the Kurdistan 24 station.

Khweis said he met an Iraqi woman with ties to IS in Turkey who arranged his travel into Syria and then across the border into Iraq. In Mosul, Khweis said he began more than a month of intensive Islamic studies and it was then he decided to try and flee.

“I didn’t agree with their ideology,” he said, explaining why he decided to escape a few weeks after arriving. “I made a bad decision to go with the girl and go to Mosul.”

Khweis said a friend helped him escape from Mosul to the nearby city of Tal Afar. From there he walked toward Kurdish troops. “I wanted to go to the Kurdish side,” he said, “because I know they are good with the Americans.”

The surrender took place on the front lines near the town of Sinjar, which was retaken by Iraqi forces from IS militants late last year. In the past year, IS fighters have lost large amounts of territory in Syria and Iraq.

Khweis is currently being held by Kurdish forces for interrogation.

Though such defections are rare, Syrian Kurdish fighters battling IS have told The Associated Press that they are seeing an increase in the number of IS members surrendering following recent territorial losses. As the militants lose territory, U.S. officials predict there will be more desertions.

“I wasn’t thinking straight,” Khweis said in the TV interview.

“My message to the American people is that the life in Mosul is really, really bad,” he said, adding that he doesn’t believe the Islamic State group accurately represents Islam.

U.S. analyst Seth Jones with the RAND Corporation said much can be gleamed about the way the Islamic State operates from Khweis’ account and his “defection” from the militant group.

“He wasn’t a senior member of the Islamic State, of ISIS, but he did at least use their network to get himself into the region,” Jones said from Arlington, Virginia. “So he’s going to know a number of things about the pipeline to get into Iraq and Syria, the key individuals at least that he associated with on his way there.”

Jones, who heads the International Security and Defense Policy Center, also said Khweis’ account is valuable, because “this is someone who was inside a training camp, wo was getting indoctrinated.”

“That’s a much more powerful narrative to undermine the ideology,” he added. “What we see now with his defection is that the picture he’s painting of what life is like in cities like Mosul is not as good as the selling points.”

The United Nations estimated that around 30,000 so-called foreign fighters from 100 countries are actively working with the Islamic State group, al-Qaida or other extremist groups. An earlier estimate by the International Center for the Study of Radicalization, a think-tank at King’s College London, said IS fighters include 3,300 Western Europeans and 100 or so Americans.

美籍聖戰士自首：邂逅魔女 誤入IS

本周向伊拉克北部庫德武裝部隊自首的一名美國伊斯蘭國（IS）戰士，聲稱參加伊斯蘭國是一個「壞決定」。他在接受伊拉克庫德第24電視台（Kurdistan 24）訪問時，表達悔意。

在這段經過刪剪的電視訪問裡，來自維吉尼亞州的26歲男子卡維斯（Mohamad Jamal Khweis）詳述他怎樣從美國到倫敦，經阿姆斯特丹、土耳其到敘利亞，最終走進伊斯蘭國控制的伊拉克城市摩蘇爾的過程。

卡維斯說，他是在土耳其邂逅一個與伊斯蘭國有聯繫的女子，其後由她安排前往敘利亞，再越過邊境到伊拉克，然後抵達伊拉克第二大城摩蘇爾。

摩蘇爾是伊斯蘭國於2014年夏天攻占，卡維斯抵達後，與數十名外國戰士先住在一起，並開始接受數月的密集式伊斯蘭教育，之後他決定逃跑。

卡維斯解釋為何到了摩蘇爾僅數個星期就決定逃跑，「我並不同意他們的思想意識。」他又說與這個女孩子一起並到摩蘇爾，是做了一個壞決定。

他說，在一位朋友協助下，逃出摩蘇爾後跑到附近的北部城市塔爾阿法爾（Tal Afar），然後徒步走向庫德部隊。他表示，跑到庫德，是因為知道他們對美國人很好。不過，庫德部隊把他扣留並嚴加審訊。

卡維斯說，他給美國的訊息是，摩蘇爾的情況極惡劣，而且也不相信伊斯蘭國是代表伊斯蘭。

美國國際安全及防衛政策中心負責人瓊斯（Seth Jones）認為，卡維斯的經歷及說法很有價值，因為他是到過訓練營的人。而聯合國估計，目前約有來自100個國家約3萬名外國戰士，為伊斯蘭國、凱達組織及其他極端組織工作。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2016/03/18/world/middleeast/ap-ml-islamic-state.html

2016-03-20 世界日報 特約編譯盧炯燊