Yahoo News Brit who went to fight for ISIS wants to return home and face justice
A British jihadi who fled a family holiday in Turkey to join ISIS is now keen to return home and face justice.
Shabazz Suleman, a former grammar school pupil from High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, disappeared three years ago.
The Turkish secret service traded him – willingly – to ISIS as part of a prisoner swap, but his jihadi career soon turned bad. He was imprisoned in Syria for going Awol and went into hiding following the fall of the caliphate’s capital, Raqqa.
He has since escaped northern Syria and has told The Times in a series of encrypted messages that he is desperate to return to Britain.
Suleman, who had won a place at Keele University shortly before his doomed trip to Turkey, has admitted to undergoing basic weapons training and carrying out guard duties but denies killing anyone.
Now believed to be in the hands of Turkish militia, he describes himself as a “disillusioned jihadi”.
He said: “I never thought I was being brainwashed until I saw the way they treat other Sunnis.”
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His father, Afzal Suleman, 46, told the paper that his son should be exempt from prosecution as “I know for a fact that he has become a civilian and he hasn’t been in the battlefield for at least two years and never killed anyone or anything.”
He added that “if he has committed a crime he should go to court. We just want him home.”
What happens next remains uncertain, though The Times reports that it is likely that Suleman will be handed to Turkish authorities, where he will be able to seek help from the British consulate.
Max Hill QC, Britain’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, believes it is right that Britain should reintegrate those who travelled “out of a sense of naivety, possibly with some brainwashing along the way”.
Rory Stewart MP, a foreign office minister, disagres, saying “the only way of dealing with them will be, in almost every case, to kill them”.
