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02-16-2018, 12:02 PM
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Foreign IS suspects claim innocence
RMEILAN, Syria: Nawaf and Hassan both left their homelands to live under the Islamic State group, but now sitting in a police station in northeast Syria they insist they did nothing wrong.
The two men in clean tracksuits, one from Bahrain and the other from Turkey, are among hundreds from some 40 nationalities who have been captured by a US-backed force of Kurdish and Arab fighters. They were caught fleeing as the self-declared "caliphate" they once served collapsed in the face of ferocious military onslaughts in both Syria and Iraq. Nawaf, 22, says he left his home in the Gulf kingdom of Bahrain and travelled via Qatar and Turkey to join IS in the summer of 2015 to "defend Muslims being bombed". He fought in Iraq but refuses to dwell on what he did there before moving to Raqa, which was the group?s Syrian capital. "It was a normal life," separated from the brutal beheadings and violence for which IS became infamous around the world, he told AFP. "We only saw them in the media or in propaganda videos." Nawaf claims he was a "simple employee" under Bahraini Turki al-Binali -- chief religious adviser who was killed in an air strike in 2017.He married a woman from Kuwait and had a daughter. "It is good", he says of the group?s severe interpretation of Islam that requires women to cover up. "Like that they don?t attract people sexually". Sitting nearby Hassan, 49, claims he is a civilian who is still having problems after several back operations. أكثر... 
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العرض الشجري