The father of a French teenager who went to fight jihad in Syria told Thursday of his desperate bid to get his beloved boy home and safe. His son was immediately arrested on his return, and remains in French police custody, reports FRANCE 24.
Abderakaz Cherif, from Nice on the French Riviera, told FRANCE 24’s sister station RFI how his two sons, aged 16 and 23, ended up in Syria as part of an al-Qaeda brigade fighting in Syria.
They had told him they were going out to a nightclub, but never came home.
After six months of searching, he finally got a response from his youngest son on social media. The teenager’s father persuaded him to leave Syria’s brutal civil war behind and cross the border into Turkey on foot.
Cherif told RFI that he managed to convince his son that the war in Syria had nothing to do with religion, and that he should get out as soon as he could.
“From the moment he left I knew that I would not be able to survive this life without my son,” he told RFI’s David Thompson. “I had to get him home safely.”
“People use religion to persuade youngsters to fight,” he explained in the radio interview (in French). “I did the same thing. I told him repeatedly that what was going on in Syria had nothing to do with him and absolutely nothing to do with Islam.”
Read more of this report from FRANCE 24.