ISIS prisoner Mohammed Khalid
Israel has acknowledged the existence of an Arab Israeli ISIS fighter who has languished in solitary confinement at a northern Iraqi prison without trial for more than two years, according to a letter obtained by
The National. It says he would be allowed to return home if he can reach Israel's borders from Iraq, despite a lack of formal ties between the two countries.
When US forces captured Mohammed Khalid in a December 2017 raid in eastern Syria following four years spent fighting for ISIS across the group's self-proclaimed state,
Israel kept the case of the Palestinian from Israel's Arab-majority Northern Triangle area, and his whereabouts, in the dark.
But after
The National interviewed him at an Iraqi Kurdish counter-terrorism facility and tracked down his family in northern Israel, the Israeli government finally acknowledged his existence in the state's first comments on his case, one fraught with legal implications and that counter-terror experts said was
the first they had witnessed of a state refusing to even recognise a foreign fighter as its own - let alone allow his repatriation.
All evidence pointed to Israeli knowledge about his case despite its denials. Before Khalid's capture, the family say
they were questioned about him on numerous occasions at Israel's Ben Gurion Airport. Since then, their repeated attempts to obtain information about him from the Israeli government since October 2018 have been ignored. Khalid himself said
Israeli security agents approached him at least twice before he fled to Syria.
Comment: Images of the incident were posted to social media: