After the town of Shaddadi in Syria’s Hasakah province was freed of Islamic State (ISIS) by the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), Russian journalists found papers that allowed them to trace the origins of one jihadi to his home in the city of Volgograd in central Russia.
The state-run Russia Today website that reported the story, identified the fighter as Alex -- not his real name. His origins were traced to his place of birth after the Russian journalists shared the passport and information they had found with a fellow journalist in Volgograd.
What emerged is that Alex had brought his wife Tamara and their three children with him. RT said it believed they were dead, perhaps in Russian airstrikes, which have been ongoing since September, though Moscow announced a partial pull-out last month.
Alex was the son of a respected professor, with a science degree and good job.
“He ended up there along with his wife, his young children, and what happened to them I don't know,” RT quoted the jihadi’s father as saying.
“I tried to make him understand, I said: ‘Aren't you scared that your children, my grandchildren, will be killed for their organs?”
According to his father, Alex converted to Islam, and his wife followed.
“He converted to Islam a decade ago. One Egyptian, who was studying at the medical faculty and went to the gym with him, got him hooked,” his father said. Tamara “wasn't really into all that (Islam), she did it all for him,” according to a friend.
Alex attended the Kirovsky district mosque in Volgograd, which has seen several police raids and has been consistently watched by security forces.
“There is this one mosque in Volgograd – its imam and his friends have been doing certain kinds of work. Their aim is to recruit young people to ISIS,” Sultan Khadji Abibakrov, the head of Volgograd region’s Muslim Union, told RT.
“They take quotes from the Koran and take them out of context – and in the end we get ‘let’s fight against infidels.’ Unknowing people hear it and think this is from the Koran – and so they believe they have to kill,” he explained.
“It’s not about Islam, it's a disease,” Alex’s father said.
Western intelligence services says that ISIS has invested millions of dollars for a campaign to recruit fighters online, using social media and chat services to hook disgruntled young men or women who are fed up with their lives and see ISIS as an escape from their problems.
According to the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT) in the Netherlands, the majority of foreign recruits fighting for ISIS in Syria and Iraq come from just four European countries: Belgium, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom,
Foreign fighters number between 3,922 - 4,294, out of which 30 percent have returned to their home countries and 14 percent are confirmed dead, the and ICCT study claimed.
The New York-based Soufan Group said in a report that jihadis from the former Russian republics, united in their ability to speak the same language, are the second-largest group of foreigners fighting ISIS.
It said they are the most disciplined of the foreign fighters and many who arrived with families are raising a second-generation of fighters for ISIS.
Moscow said last month that more than 2,000 Russian ISIS recruits had been killed in Russia’s air campaign in Syria.