An American ISIS fighter named Mohamad Jamal Khweis handed himself over to Kurdish Peshmerga fighters in Iraq on Monday and the question I keep asking myself, “What did he expect?” I already have my answer. Are we to believe that he truly didn’t know what he was getting himself into? Millions of people here, in Europe and everywhere else in the world are not ignorant to what ISIS stands for. So why did he change his mind?

Addressing viewers, the fighter stated to reporters, “Life in Mosul is really, very bad. The people who control Mosul don’t represent a religion.”

Is that so? What religion did he think ISIS was representing when he went over there, Buddhism? ISIS was killing Christians and Muslims for more than 19 months before Secretary of State John Kerry said Thursday that the United States has determined that ISIS’ action against the Yazidis and other minority groups in Iraq and Syria constitutes genocide. ISIS has murdered Syrians, Iraqis, and Kurds for years and raped these countries women and children. Most of the world linked into technology has seen videos or news about the kind of mayhem ISIS does to people who they believe don’t follow Islam. ISIS is killing people in the most heart-breaking and sickening ways.

ISIS seeks a global caliphate, according to its propaganda and they have articulated their global vision numerous times. In the magazine known as Dabiq ISIS stated the following:

ISIS’s ultimate end is likely a global war, not a limited war for local control inside Iraq and Syria. ISIS’s vision for a prospering caliphate requires that it instigate a broader war to compromise states competing with it for legitimacy.

The Islamic State offers something that is romantic and transcendent but let’s be clear here about ISIS-It is evil. The Lebanon based company called Quantum Communications collected televised interviews with 49 fighters in Syria and Iraq. Some of the fighters defected, and others did not but all were in custody. The researchers from Quantum analyzed the fighters’ statements using a psycho-contextual analytical technique developed by Canadian psychologist Marisa Zavalloni to divine the motivational forces and personal characteristics of the subjects.

Here are some insights to chew on:

• Status seekers: Intent on improving “their social standing” these people are driven primarily by money “and a certain recognition by others around them.”
• Identity seekers: Prone to feeling isolated or alienated, these individuals “often feel like outsiders in their initial unfamiliar/unintelligible environment and seek to identify with another group.” Islam, for many of these provides “a pre-packaged transnational identity.”
• Revenge seekers: They consider themselves part of a group that is being repressed by the West or someone else.
• Redemption seekers: They joined ISIS because they believe it vindicates them, or ameliorates previous sinfulness.
• Responsibility seekers: Basically, people who have joined or support ISIS because it provides some material or financial support for their family.
• Thrill seekers: Joined ISIS for adventure.
• Ideology seekers: These want to impose their view of Islam on others.
• Justice seekers: They respond to what they perceive as injustice. “The justice seekers’ ‘raison d’être’ ceases to exist once the perceived injustice stops,” the report says.
• Death seekers: These people “have most probably suffered from a significant trauma/loss in their lives and consider death as the only way out with a reputation of martyr instead of someone who has committed suicide.”

To understand more follow this link: Why Do People Join ISIS Report. Out of those nine reasons do you see one lableled TRUTH seeker? Of course not. Men like Khweis are self-seekers. Sybarites who care little about anyone else. I don’t need 20 sheets of a report to tell me what I already know. Islam is becoming a major problem in every single country it occupies and those who are misguding the public to believe it is akin to other faiths are very misguided. We are fighting against those who seek to reprogram the way people see the world. ISIS in particular is selling it to the public in a hard form via a well thought out recruitment, selection and socialization process. Khweis asks us to believe that he had a change of heart. At the moment it is unclear what his combact activities amounted to. Isn’t the goal of ISIS to conquer the world and push a Claiphate on everyone. Isn’t its goal to kill Muslims and Christians because they don’t follow Sharia? It seems to me that he is presenting himself as a hapless fellow who really didn’t know what he was getting himself into. Weren’t the sickening killings good indicators of what was to come?

Kweis stated to those recording him by video, “At the time I made the decision, I was not thinking straight. On the way there I regretted, and I wanted to go back home after things didn’t work out and saw myself living in such an environment,” His journey started by way of London and eventually made it to Amsterdam. After staying in Amsterdam for a week he travelled through Turkey and this where he met the Iraqi woman whom he would eventually travel to Mosul with.

A video posted on social media Monday appeared to show the young man’s surrender. In the video he tells Kurdish military officials that he is American. They stated the 26 year-old man, identified in the media as Mohamad Jamal Khweis of Virginia, had been among a small group of ISIS fighters with whom they exchanged fire a day before Khweis surrender.

Khweis stated to the Kurdish news outlet K24 that the conditions in Mosul were deplorable. Mosul is a large ISIS-controlled city in Iraq. He stated that he met a woman who claimed to be from Mosul and the two journeyed there. “We got to know each other. She knew someone who could take us from Turkey to Syria and from Syria to Mosul,” he said.

“There was an imam who taught us the sharia and the religion,” he said. “I didn’t complete the whole sharia. I didn’t agree with their ideology and that’s when I wanted to escape.”

“Our daily life was prayer, eating and learning about the religion for eight hours,” he said. “It was pretty hard to live in Mosul. It’s not like the Western countries … There’s no smoking.” It appears he wanted to be a “cool guy” judge-jury-and executioner by killing people but didn’t want to do “other” work required to go with the job. Sounds like he’s amounted to nothing more than another slacker.

Slacker:

A driver’s license now circulating on social media gave his residence as Alexandria, Virginia. Nice, he’s just miles away from my own city. So, he found Alexandria to be less than satisfying and Mosul to be even worse.

Recall what he first said? He stated, “I stayed there about a month, and I found it very, very hard to live there. I decided to return back home,” he said. What did Khweis expect? Perhaps he became aware of the hypocrisy and corruption within ISIS and its leadership. Recall his words, “My message to the American people is the life in Mosul, it’s really, really bad. The people [who] were controlling Mosul don’t represent the religion,”. I find it difficult to believe he couldn’t have known. Can someone tell me what the goal of ISIS was again?

 “Idolatry is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice.”-G.K. Chesterton  ILN, 9/11/1909