An ISIS fighter believed to be US-born says he wanted to return home after finding it "very hard" to live in Mosul, the terror group's stronghold. He told Kurdistan24 TV he was led to the area by someone who vowed to take him "near Turkey's border."
Mohamad Jamal Khweis, a 26-year-old US citizen from Virginia as described by the channel, surrendered himself to Kurdish Peshmerga forces near the city of Sinjar in northern Iraq on Monday, after living in Mosul for "about a month." The city is under the control of Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL).
In early 2016, Khewis traveled to Turkey via London and Amsterdam, where he met an Iraqi girl from Mosul. The two decided to travel to the IS stronghold together.
"First, we took a bus from Istanbul to Gaziantep...from there, a driver picked us up and took us to the border and then [we went] from Syria to Iraq," he told Kurdistan 24 news channel. They arrived in Mosul on January 16.
But before he even arrived in Mosul, Khewis realized he had made a "bad decision."
Comment: Update 19 March 2016 - 8:24 UTC
RT cites a Russian emergency service employee stating that: Indeed, this video, apparently showing the plane crash, shows something nosediving into the ground:
Another report cites an expert from the FOBOS weathercast center in southern Russia claiming that: We could be looking at yet another airplane downed by some sort of extreme microburst.