Major General Feisal Helkani, of the Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga forces, claimed Khweis was “lurking near the peshmerga lines” since Sunday night, and his troops had first tried to shoot him, assuming he was a suicide bomber.
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An ISIS fighter captured Monday showed his captors a driver’s license that identifies him as being from Alexandria, Va., according to a report by ABC News.
USA officials are extremely interested in interviewing Mohamad Jamal Khweis, who is believed to be the first American fighting with the group to have ever surrendered in the field.
About a dozen American citizens have joined ISIS in Iraq and Syria, U.S. intelligence officials told CBS News. But U.S. criminal investigators said they are probing Khweis’s activities. The Kurdish authorities said he was trying to make his way back to the US when he was apprehended near the town of Sinjar while leaving the ISIS stronghold of Mosul.
The Virginia resident traveled from Syria through several European countries and ultimately Turkey last December with a young Iraqi woman, the Kurdistan Regional Security Council said in a statement.
Amin had various forms of identification on him including, bank cards, and a Virginia driver’s license.
He was taken to Erbil, Turkey, where the US has a military presence. The oil city of Kirkuk is under Peshmerga control while Baiji which has an oil refinery is held by the Badr Organisation the largest component of the Shi’ite Popular Mobilisation Forces coalition that assembled in 2014 to fight Islamic State.
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The story also comes on the heels, USA Today noted, of what it called a “disillusioned former Islamic State militant” releasing “tens of thousands of documents” that are believed to contain the personal information – names, addresses, and phone numbers – of up to 22,000 ISIS agents.
