“I joined ISIS through someone from our area named Abu Mahmood,” Hassan Hamza, 21, from a village near Nawaran told Rudaw of the time he first joined the radical group. “He asked me to become a militant of the Islamic State and said ‘I will get you a salary. If you are martyred you will go to paradise’ and I said ‘alright’.”
From his village Hamza was taken to a military base where he was put through weeks of basic training until appointed a guard at an ISIS shelter near Tal Afar, west of Mosul.
“One day when I was in Tal Afar, a special ISIS force came and their emir [leader] chose me alongside a few more saying ‘we are taking you to Raqqa’. As soon as we arrived, they put us in a base outside the city which was surrounded by lots of gardens.” Hamza recalled.
During his first six months with ISIS, he said, he “received strong and regular trainings. Then, they chose six of us to train on how to carry out beheadings.”
The training began by watching beheadings of hostages and prisoners carried out by more experienced ISIS militants “then I was called to repeat the same thing.”
“After we watched the beheading scenes, they would tell us about the importance of such punishments.” Hamza now said. “After that, the trainers would behead some people in front of us.”
When the day came for him to put his learning into practice Hamza was brought a number of Shiite hostages and told to “behead some of them as training, so I beheaded six of them.”
The former ISIS executioner revealed that he and his fellow militants had been indoctrinated by the group that the Kurdish Peshmerga were “infidels and we have to do jihad against them.”
Now in captivity, Hamza feels that his ISIS superiors had deceived him and he regrets his actions.
“What ISIS said about the Peshmerga was not true as they treated me in a good way,” he said of his time since his capture. “They are Muslims and they do pray.”
Not sure whether or not it will reach them, Hamza sent out a message to his fellow militants urging them to put down their weapons and stop fighting or their only fate is death.
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