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UP FRONTSaturday 19 March 2016

Top fugitive in Paris attacks captured American Islamic State fighter
says he made “a bad decision”
Continued from front with guns and automatic France’s BFM television
weapons drawn, escorting broadcast images of po- BALINT SZLANKO
His capture brought instant people out of buildings. lice tugging a man with a Associated Press
relief to police and ordi- A witness described hear- white hooded sweatshirt IRBIL, Iraq (AP) — The American Islamic State group
nary people in France and ing gunshots and officers toward a police car, as he fighter who handed himself over to Kurdish forces in
Belgium who had been repeatedly yelling over a dragged his left leg as if it northern Iraq earlier this week said he made “a bad
looking over their shoulder loudspeaker to suspects were injured. decision” in joining the IS, according to a heavily ed-
for Abdeslam since Nov. holed up inside the apart- Abdeslam was not armed ited interview he gave to an Iraqi Kurdish television sta-
13, when Islamic extrem- ment building. but did not immediately tion.
ist attackers fanned out Authorities first sealed off obey orders when con- In the TV interview, which aired late Thursday night,
Mohamad Jamal Khweis, 26, from Alexandria, Virginia
In this framegrab taken from VTM, armed police officers escort a suspect to a police vehicle detailed his weeks-long journey from the United States
during a raid in the Molenbeek neighborhood of Brussels, Belgium, Friday March 18, 2016. After to London, Amsterdam, Turkey, through Syria and fi-
an intense four-month manhunt across Europe and beyond, police on Friday captured Salah nally to the IS-controlled Iraqi city of Mosul.
Abdeslam, the top fugitive in the Paris attacks in the same Brussels neighborhood where he grew Once in Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city that was
up. captured by the Islamic State in the summer of 2014,
Khweis was moved into a house with dozens of other
(VTM via AP) foreign fighters, he told the Kurdistan 24 station.
Khweis said he met an Iraqi woman with ties to IS in Tur-
across the French capital the neighborhood. Then fronted by police, Belgian key who arranged his travel into Syria and then across
and killed 130 people at a police began shouting to prosecutor Eric Van der the border into Iraq. In Mosul, Khweis said he began
rock concert, the national a particular apartment, Sypt said. more than a month of intensive Islamic studies and it
stadium and cafes. It was demanding that the occu- It was possible he had was then he decided to try and flee.
France’s deadliest attack pants come out with their spent days, weeks or “I didn’t agree with their ideology,” he said, explaining
in decades. hands up, said Fatiha Hrika, months in the apartment, why he decided to escape a few weeks after arriving.
Abdeslam and four other a 39-year-old child-care according to Van der Sypt, “I made a bad decision to go with the girl and go to
suspects were detained worker who lives a few who said the investigation Mosul.”
in Friday’s raid, including doors down from where would continue day and Khweis said a friend helped him escape from Mosul
three members of a fam- the raid happened. night. to the nearby city of Tal Afar. From there he walked
ily that sheltered him. Ab- After shots were fired, she French President Francois toward Kurdish troops. “I wanted to go to the Kurdish
deslam was shot in the leg told The Associated Press, Hollande said authorities side,” he said, “because I know they are good with
and was hospitalized, and “they piled in. We heard will continue hunting for the Americans.”
another arrested with him noises all around. And anyone who aided the at- The surrender took place on the front lines near the
was also wounded, offi- that’s when they pulled tacks in any way. He said town of Sinjar, which was retaken by Iraqi forces from
cials said. out the Salah (guy.) They those people are much IS militants late last year. In the past year, IS fighters
During Friday’s police op- put him to the ground.” more numerous than au- have lost large amounts of territory in Syria and Iraq.
eration, a phalanx of offi- She described seeing the thorities had believed, and Khweis is currently being held by Kurdish forces for in-
cers in camouflage, masks suspect put into an ambu- that the French govern- terrogation.
and riot helmets marched lance followed by a SWAT ment would seek to have Though such defections are rare, Syrian Kurdish fight-
through the neighborhood team. Abdeslam extradited. ers 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 inter-
view.
“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 “defec-
tion” 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 him-
self 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.”