© ReutersAtheer Ali's photo in an Islamic State registry found in a training facility in eastern Mosul, Iraq
"My dear family, please forgive me," reads the handwritten letter discarded in the dusty halls of an Isis training compound in eastern Mosul. "Don't be sad and don't wear the black clothes [of mourning]. I asked to get married and you did not marry me off. So, by God, I will marry the 72 virgins in paradise."
They were schoolboy Alaa Abd al-Akeedi's parting words before he set off from the compound to end his life in a suicide bomb attack against Iraqi security forces last year.The letter was written on an Isis form marked "Soldiers' Department, Martyrs' Brigade" and in an envelope addressed to his parents' home in western Mosul.
Akeedi, aged 15 or 16 when he signed up, was one of dozens of young recruits who passed through the training facility in the past two and a half years as they prepared to wage jihad. In several cases this involved carrying out
suicide attacks - Isis's most effective weapon against a US-backed military campaign to retake the group's last major urban bastion in Iraq.
His letter never reached his family. It was left behind with a handful of other bombers' notes to relatives when Isis abandoned the facility in the face of an army offensive that has reclaimed more than half of the city since October. The militants also left a
handwritten registry containing the personal details of about 50 recruits. Not all entries had years of birth, and only about a dozen had photographs attached, but
many recruits were in their teens or early twenties.
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