{"id":19554,"date":"2018-10-23T15:24:00","date_gmt":"2018-10-23T15:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=19554"},"modified":"2018-10-23T15:24:00","modified_gmt":"2018-10-23T15:24:00","slug":"german-daesh-shoemaker-pleads-to-come-home-from-syria","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=19554","title":{"rendered":"German Daesh \u2018shoemaker\u2019 pleads to come home from Syria"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\nRMELAN, Syria: From northern Syria, Muslim convert Sufyan is imploring his native Germany to take him back, having been captured years after joining the Daesh group\u2019s so-called \u201ccaliphate.\u201d
His beard neatly buzzed, Sufyan is one of hundreds of foreigners held by the Kurdish People\u2019s Protection Units (YPG) in war-torn Syria, accused of fighting for Daesh.
The 36-year-old insists he was not a fighter, but a misguided civilian making orthopaedic shoes and prosthetics in Daesh territory.
\u201cI am not Jihadi John, I am not Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, I am not Adnani,\u201d said Sufyan, listing Daesh\u2019s infamous British executioner, its elusive chief, and its now-dead spokesman.
\u201cI just made limbs,\u201d added the pale-skinned Sufyan, who refused to give his real name and said he was from Stuttgart in southwest Germany.
He was selected to speak to AFP by the YPG, who detained him around a year ago and were present during the interview.
They have refused to try accused foreign fighters in their custody, urging Western countries to take them back.
Some foreign governments have agreed to do so, but most are reluctant.
The US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces are holding several alleged German Daesh members, including Mohammad Haydar Zammar, a Syrian-born German national accused of helping plan the September 11 attacks.
Berlin is not known to have repatriated anyone, but Sufyan hopes he, his Syrian wife and their son can start afresh in Germany.
\u201cPeople make mistakes and I was naive,\u201d he said, dressed in a yellow hoody with a side zip, cargo pants, and black beanie.
\u201cI just want to go back to my old life.\u201d
Speaking in near-fluent English peppered with Arabic words, Sufyan recounts his winding journey to what he thought would be a pious life under Islamic rule.
In 2014, Daesh declared a \u201ccaliphate\u201d across large parts of Syria and neighboring Iraq.
The following year, Sufyan traveled across Europe and Turkey, finally crossing into Syria in March 2015, four years into the Syrian war.
Once inside, he says, Daesh shuffled him among safe houses for weeks alongside Australians, Central Asians, and Russians.
He was given one month of military training and assigned to a battalion, but claims he never fought.
\u201cI didn\u2019t fight and I didn\u2019t kill anyone,\u201d he said.
\u201cI never killed any person in my life.\u201d
Instead, Sufyan was hired at a hospital in Daesh\u2019s de facto Syrian capital Raqqa, using his 12 years\u2019 experience as an orthopaedic shoemaker.
\u201cThey teach me over there prosthetics. Until I came to YPG, I was doing this job… making prosthetic and orthopaedic shoes,\u201d he said.
In 2016, he married a Syrian woman from northwest Idlib, and they had a son.
They stayed in Raqqa until YPG-led forces surrounded the northern city in 2017, forcing them to flee to the Daesh-held eastern town of Mayadeen.
Sufyan took up the same work there until Mayadeen came under attack, this time by the Russia-backed Syrian regime.
He said he had grown embittered toward Daesh by then and decided to pay a smuggler to bring him and his family to a YPG checkpoint.
\u201cI was not ready to kill someone or to die, so I decided to go out,\u201d said Sufyan. \u201cEveryone was running away.\u201d
A year later, Sufyan lives separated from his wife and son, who are detained in a Kurdish-run camp. He desperately wants to be reunited with his family.
Kurdish authorities say they have in their custody around 520 male foreign Daesh members, 550 women and around 1,200 children from 44 countries.
According to a European Parliament report in May, Germany estimates there are 290 children with claims to German citizenship in Iraq and Syria.
\u201cIf I can come back to Germany and if Germany want to punish me, I will accept this, to stay in prison,\u201d Sufyan told AFP.
\u201cI hope it will not be a long sentence, because I miss already my wife and my son,\u201d he said.
He hopes to study or open his own business in his homeland, for which he has renewed appreciation since meeting Syrians who \u201csee Germany as something like a paradise on earth.\u201d
\u201cI know Germany is a country with a lot of \u2018rahma\u2019 with a lot of people. I expect that Germany will have also \u2018rahma\u2019 with me,\u201d he said, using the Arabic word for \u201cmercy.\u201d
Sufyan has written to his parents in Germany, who replied and also sent a letter and money to his wife.
Included in his parents\u2019 reply was a picture of a bicycle, which has kept Sufyan\u2019s hopes of returning home alive.
\u201cMy brain says, why will my mother and my father buy a bicycle for my son if he is in Syria? I hope I can go back to my country and make a new start.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

RMELAN, Syria: From northern Syria, Muslim convert Sufyan is imploring his native Germany to take him back, having been captured years after joining the Daesh group\u2019s so-called \u201ccaliphate.\u201dHis beard neatly buzzed, Sufyan is one of hundreds of foreigners held by the Kurdish People\u2019s Protection Units (YPG) in war-torn Syria, accused of fighting for Daesh.The 36-year-old…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":19555,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19554"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19554\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/19555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}