Israfil Yilmaz, a 28-year-old Dutch citizen of Turkish descent, said he left a career in the Royal Netherlands Army in 2013 to join Islamist rebels fightiing to topple Bashar al-Assad.
Israfil started documenting his life in the self-proclaimed caliphate on Tumblr because he was banned from Twitter, Instagram and Ask.fm. Now, his Tumblr has been removed too.Interspersed between answers, Israfil posted photos of his baby son, and internet-friendly propaganda images of Isis fighters cuddling kittens.
Some of the questions were personal. When asked if he missed his mother, he replied: ‘At times, yes.’
Others were practical. ‘I’ve heard that you’re not
allowed to use Apple products, iPhones etc,’ someone asked.‘This is true, I had to sell my wife’s iPhone,’ Israfil
replied.
Someone even asked: ‘Isn’t Tumblr haram [sinful] by the
way?’
‘If you’re on Tumblr (or any other social media outlet) for the wrong reasons,’ he replied, ‘and use it to please your desires and other unlawful things, of course, but that goes for many other things.’
But aside from these relatively mundane sentiments, some
of Israfil’s responses were incredibly dark – and a stark reminder of the
brutal regime the group upholds.
For example, he joked about gay men deserving to be
‘thrown off a high building’, and defended the systematic rape and torture of
Yazidi women and young girls by describing them as ‘spoils of war’.
In response to a question from the New York Times, he
also defended last week’s terror attacks in Paris which killed 130 people –
referencing the bombing of Isis settlements by the French Air Force.
‘Would I make a big deal out of it if Isis declared war
on Iceland, and Iceland started attacking us?’ he asked rhetorically.
‘Of course not. That’s life in the big city, you can’t
just declare war on the Muslims (kill their women and children) and expect to
be left alone even though you might reside somewhere far away.
‘That’s something everybody understands right?’
Source:Metro
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