Cairo: A gym freak, a fan of rap music and a philanderer, Islam Yakin, 22, has recently raised many eyebrows in his homeland Egypt after joining the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil), an Al Qaida splinter group in control of vast swathes of Iraq and Syria.
Yakin studied high school at the 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 graduation in 2013, the multilingual man disappeared from Egypt only to surprise his friends later with posts on social media saying he is in Syria fighting along with Islamist militants against troops of President Bashar Al Assad.
“He was an ordinary young man who was fond of travelling and having affairs with girls,” said a school friend of Yakin, who asked not to be named for fear of trouble with security agencies. “Islam used to practise at a gym near his house where he became a trainer later. He bragged about his muscles and was not religiously committed at all. In 2013, he showed sudden signs of religiosity and soon cut off his ties with most of his friends. This raised our worries and soon he disappeared. Later we found out that he went to Syria to fight there.”
Yakin, who nicknamed himself Abu Salma Bin Yakin in his tweets, recently posted photos of himself on horseback wielding a sword, allegedly in Syria’s northeastern city of Al Raqqa. In another photo, he is shown sitting on a tank with the caption: “So you don’t say I only ride horses.” In a third photo, he is shown along with chopped heads of alleged Syrian soldiers.
“I hope that brothers in the Islamic State when they slaughter somebody will write his name on his back so that if his head is cut off, we’ll know his body,” Yakin wrote in a tweet.
His family, still living in Heliopolis, refused repeated requests for an interview.
“Islam went to Syria in the final days of Mursi in response to calls from the Muslim Brotherhood for jihad [holy war] in Syria,” said Osama Majed, a friend of Yakin, referring to Egyptian Islamist president Mohammad Mursi, who was deposed by the army in July 2013. “Islam was not keen on attending the university regularly and was fond of going to noisy parties,” Majed, who knew Yakin for six years, told private broadcaster ONTV.
“Although he belongs to a Salafist [ultraconservative] family, he did not follow them. Things went like this until he came to know some hardliners and started to go to listen to their sermons in a mosque in Heliopolis. He suddenly travelled to Syria and began to call his friends in Egypt infidels. I tried to contact him, but it was to no avail. It is clear that his family is pleased with the change he has undergone.”
Yakin’s dramatic U-turn has caused a stir in Egypt where authorities are locked in a bloody fight against Islamist insurgents.
“Yakin’s case is not an isolated case,” said Sherif Abdeen, an analyst at state-run newspaper Al Ahram. “Probably, it is the tip of the iceberg of hundreds, if not thousands, of young Egyptian and Arab people. The proof is that his posts on the social media have attracted hundreds of admirers as he sees nothing bad about posting photos of Syrian soldiers’ chopped heads kept inside a bucket with the caption ‘head meat’.”
According to Abdeen, Yakin’s case poses a threat to Egypt’s national security. “It exposes a frantic activity by militant groups to recruit Egyptian youth under the cloak of religion in the absence of a systematic reaction from the state authorities and Al Azhar,” he said, referring to Egypt’s prestigious Sunni Islamic institution.
In several tweets, Yakin has taken on his detractors. “I had lived a loose life like Al jahiliya (the pre-Islamic times), but when I abandoned this life due to the grace of God, this has become a problem for people.”
He also denied claims that he is a follower of Mursi’s Muslim Brotherhood. “Some people called me a militant. Others called me a Daishi (Arabic for a member of Isil). I ignored all this. But I won’t keep silent if someone calls me a [Muslim] Brother.”
Egypt’s Salafist Call group has, meanwhile, denied that Yakin is one of its members. “He has never joined us. Our group rejects violence and hates bloodshed,” it said in a statement. There was no official comment on Yakin’s saga.
“Islam’s case reflects a crisis of many young people in Egyptian society,” said sociology professor Sawsan Fayed. “It is the result of failure to empower them or actively engage them in building society in a way that would help them achieve self-fulfilment. Thus, they fall an easy prey to radical groups, which manipulate religion to dupe them into believing that by joining them, they [youth] would please God and change the world for the better.”
