IRBIL, Iraq— The American Islamic State group fighter who handed himself over to Kurdish forces in Iraq’s north earlier this week said he made “a bad decision” joining IS, according to a heavily edited interview he gave to an Iraqi Kurdish television station that aired late Thursday night.
Mohamad Jamal Khweis, 26, from Alexandria, Virginia detailed his weeks-long journey from the United States to London, Amsterdam, Turkey, through Syria and finally to the IS-controlled Iraqi city of Mosul, where he was moved into a house with dozens of other foreign fighters.
Khweis said he met an Iraqi woman with ties to IS in Turkey who arranged his travel into Syria and then across to Mosul. There Khweis said he began more than a month of intensive Islamic studies and it was then he decided to try and flee.
