Analysis by Mawassi Lahcen in Casablanca
for Magharebia
Maghreb youths are the latest Daesh deserters to be executed for wanting to quit the terror group
A change of heart proves deadly for young Moroccans who try to leave Daesh.
“They were looking for paradise, but only found hell.”
Such is the condition of foreign fighters in Syria, according to a Moroccan analyst. “The Islamic State won’t allow them to leave, so they won’t be able to tell the world what’s really happening.”
At Agadir Street in Casablanca, people are talking about one local youth who went to Syria to fight for ISIS, only to be killed by the group because he wanted to come home.
“He was an ordinary guy,” a friend tells Magharebia. “The last time I met him, he was bragging about his new Nike sports shoes. There was nothing at all about him suggesting that he would travel to Syria for jihad.”
His father, who owns a butcher’s shop near Commerce market, gave him the money to travel.
“I didn’t know that my son was going to travel to Syria to join ISIS,” the father says. “He just told me that he was going to travel to a Gulf country to work. Although I wasn’t enthusiastic about that, and preferred that he stayed in Morocco to help me in my work, I gave in.”
So he was surprised when his son called to say he was in Syria.
“We’ll meet in heaven,” the son said to his father at the end of his call. A few days later, he called back, saying he was in trouble, regretted coming to Syria and wanted to return to Morocco.
Things were completely different from what he had imagined, he told his father. The young man was very upset during the call.
A few days later, the family received news that their son had been killed in battle.
‘ISIS just liquidated him’.
“I knew right away that they killed him. ISIS just liquidated him because he wanted to return,” the father says.
News about the suspected execution of the butcher’s son has greatly affected local youths.
“There are four other guys from the neighbourhood in Syria, and we fear they will face the same fate,” one notes.
The Moroccan young man was not the only fighter killed by ISIS for changing his mind, after discovering that the reality in Iraq and Syria was completely different from the picture painted by jihadist recruiters.
In recent weeks, there have been many reports about ISIS killing scores of its own fighters, from different nationalities, just because they wanted to quit.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights recorded 120 such cases within the last six months.
“These are just the ones that were verified by the Observatory,” the report says. “As to the actual number of executions carried out by ISIS against foreign fighters who joined, it is much higher.”
According to Abdelmajid Hachadi, a journalist who specialises in terrorism cases, a number of families in Beni Mellal and Al-Hoceima received calls from their sons complaining about conditions in Syria and wishing for a way to return home.
So it came as a surprise when they suddenly heard that the youths had been killed in suicide operations or in battle.
“ISIS is behaving like any other criminal outlawed gang,” Hachadi tells Magharebia. “It can’t allow any of its elements to simply withdraw because they will carry the group’s secrets, which can be passed to security agencies. Like all other criminal gangs, ISIS prefers to liquidate its men rather than allow them to leave. ”
Executing those with a change of heart also deters others from following their example, he says.
“By killing those hesitant members, the terrorist group is sending a strong message to the others to dissuade them from thinking about leaving or expressing resentment or dissatisfaction,” Hachadi notes.
“In the case of ISIS, there is another factor; any criticism of the group or expression of a different opinion is seen as apostasy or treason, and must, therefore, be punished with death,” he adds.
Daesh is also trying to cover its tracks, political science professor Miloud Belkadi suggests.
Some fighters that were arrested after returning from Syria “constituted a rich source of information for investigators about recruitment networks, channels of sending fighters overseas, sources of financing and locations of training”, he says.
One-way ticket
“It seems that ISIS has learnt the lesson, and therefore, 2015 will witness the execution of anyone who thinks about quitting the group,” Belkadi adds.
“When those young men were recruited, they were deceived and promised paradise on earth,” Belkadi says. “However, when they arrived there, they discovered they had gone to hell. ISIS doesn’t want anyone to know about this hell. To hide reality, it won’t allow any of its elements to leave in the future.”
This one-way ticket policy applies to everyone, whether they’re “women brought for its fighters to engage in prostitution under the pretext of jihad annikah, or fighters and suicide bombers who change their minds”, he says. “From now on, anyone who joins ISIS won’t leave it alive,” the professor repeats.
Zakaria Yathreb, a local accountant, pays close attention to security news and sees a storm brewing: “The only thing that ISIS is good at is killing; they don’t just kill those who have a different opinion even though if they embrace the same al-Qaeda’s Salafi jihadi ideology, they also kill each other.”
“If the loyalty of any element, especially foreign fighters, is doubted, they just kill him,” he says.
A Twitter post from ISIS this week offered a significant reward to anyone who provided information on spies, the accountant asserts.
“If this is true, many foreign fighters will be executed in the coming days because of false rumours or suspicions that they are agents of intelligence agencies of countries taking part in the international coalition against ISIS,” he says.
“It’s enough for a fighter to be distant for a little while to call his wife or a relative to raise suspicions that he is a spy and agent, and thus deserve a bullet in his back from his emir.” Yathreb tells Magharebia.
Daesh has even reportedly formed military units specialised in liquidating fighters who pull back during battles.
These “death squads” recently executed scores of fighters who left their positions when battles became fierce, Yathreb adds.
