Cairo: Egyptian gym freak-turned-militant Islam Yakin was killed in fighting alongside the militant Daesh in the Kurdish town of Kobani in northern Syria, militant websites reported on Monday. It was not clear when the 22 year old was killed.
Yakin, also a fan of rap music, left Egypt last year and joined the Al Qaida-splinter group, which controls large swathes of Syria and Iraq.
Yakin, who nicknamed himself Abu Salma Bin Yakin in his tweets, recently posted photos of himself wielding a sword on a horseback allegedly inside Syria and standing next to beheaded Syrian soldiers with the caption: “Of course, the joy of Eid is not complete without one of the corpses of the dogs”. Another picture he posted on Twitter showed two decapitated heads in a deep cooking pot with the caption #head_meat followed by a smiley.
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Daesh has tried since September to capture the Kurdish-majority town of Kobani located near the Turkish border. The militants’ advance into the town has been largely hampered by a US-led air campaign and the Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga forces, fighting along Syrian Kurds.
In a purported will, Yakin prayed to God to “accept his deeds”, which he said were pursued to please Him.
“Good tidings to he who has chosen jihad for the sake of God so that His word will sway supreme and His Sharia will prevail,” he said in the alleged will posted alongside the news of his death.
“God has bestowed on us the presence of the Islamic State [Daesh], to which migration is obligatory. Swearing allegiance to the Emir of Believers, Ebrahim Bin Awad Al Badri is obligatory,” he said referring to the self-appointed “caliph” of Daesh, Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi.
Yakin studied high school at the elite French Lycee la Liberte in the eastern Cairo quarter of Heliopolis and earned a law degree at Ain Shams University in the Egyptian capital. Months after his 2013 graduation, the multilingual man disappeared from Egypt only to surprise his friends later with posts on social media saying he was in Syria fighting along with militants against Syrian President Bashar Al Assad’s troops.
In his purported will, Yakin also urged the slaughter of what he called “infidels, the Arab tyrants, their armies and supporters”.
Rights groups have repeatedly condemned Daesh for massive human abuses and war crimes. According to Yakin, beadings and car bombings are the best acts to “qualify for God’s reward”.
He urged his family leave Egypt for the so-called Islamic State, alleging that the move will help them to “live the rest of their lives in compliance with God Almighty’s Sharia”. There was no immediate comment from his family still living in Cairo. In one purported tweet, he is said to have told his mother to move to Daesh territory and live on the banks of the Euphrates river. According to Egyptian websites, Yakin had sought to live by the Nile in Egypt before heading to fight.
Yakin’s dramatic turn from a muscleman fond of rap music to a radical sounded alarm bells in Egypt, which is locked in fighting against Islamist insurgents. His case challenged the classical view of militants as being poor and illiterate people.
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