A French man has appeared in a video posted by the Islamic State speaking about the story behind his conversion to Islam and his decision to join the militant group seeking an Islamic caliphate in the Arab region.
The 65-year-old former Catholic clerical school student, dubbed Abu Sohaib al-Faransi, spoke in the 15-minute video screened on Jihadist monitor group SITE’s website of life under the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
Faransi, who appeared in the video with a long beard, military fatigues and a machine gun in his hands, said that while the image he had of the IS was that of terrorism and extremism, he found the opposite to be true after joining the group.
"When I entered the land of the caliphate, I saw that there were different things, institutions, cleanliness, engineers, doctors, sensible people, people who left Europe, who left other lands from across the world to knowingly come fight jihad completely honestly,” he said.
Faransi noted that the declaration by IS’s supreme commander, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, of the group’s intention to establish an Islamic caliphate inspired him to join after he failed to find “clear answers” for his questions in his Catholic school.
