An Indian student who travelled to Iraq to join the Islamic State group has returned home disillusioned after jihadists made him clean toilets and do other menial jobs, according to media reports.
Areeb Majeed, 23, left for Iraq with three friends in late May amid fears by authorities that IS militants were attempting to recruit from India’s large pool of young Muslim men.
The engineering student flew home Friday to Mumbai where he was arrested and charged by India’s elite National Investigation Agency (NIA) with terror-related offences.
Majeed told NIA officers he was sidelined by the jihadists for whom he fetched water and performed other lowly tasks such as cleaning toilets, instead of taking part in the deadly offensive like he wanted, the Press Trust of India news agency reported.
He phoned his family to say he wanted to come home after suffering an unexplained bullet wound for which he did not get proper medical attention, the agency said late Sunday.
“Only after I begged them, I was taken to a hospital,” he was quoted as saying by NIA officers. “There was neither a holy war nor any of the preaching in the holy book were followed.”
India’s moderate population of 150 million Muslims have traditionally not been drawn into sectarian conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere, but the case of the four raised concerns about online recruitment.
