Dad calls ISIS son’s death ‘happiness’

“This is happiness. We know where they are going,” Mikail’s father, Ali, told Newsday yesterday during an interview at his San Juan home.

Ali said his son died on August 16 somewhere between Aleppo and Raqqa from shrapnel during an air strike.

At the time he was fighting for the Islamic State (IS), also known as ISIS.

Another of his sons, who is also in Syria, Ali said, called him and gave him the news.

Asked how Mikail’s mother took the news, Ali said, “She is happy for her son. Friends are coming and crying, and she is consoling them.

We know where he has gone. We are happy.

Only a Muslim will understand that.” Mikail is survived by his wife. Asked who is taking care of her in Syria, Ali said not to worry about that and that she was being well cared for.

She told family members who offered to travel to Syria to bring her back home to Trinidad that she does not want to return and that they must go to live with her instead.

Mikail and his brother and their families, Ali said, left Trinidad a year and a half ago to fight for IS. He said when they left, he expected that they would have lasted three months at the longest. So it was no surprise when he got news that Mikail had died. He said he would normally talk to his sons once a week.

Mikail was pursing Islamic studies in Saudi Arabia. He and his wife had initially gone to Egypt to study where he was among the top five — topping the five — to be selected for a scholarship to study in Saudi Arabia.

It was during a break from school, Ali said, that Mikail and his brother, who became impassioned over the devastation being wreaked on Muslims by the war, joined the fight for IS.

“They said they would like to fight to help Muslims.

We all have to die,” Ali said, contending that Muslims were fighting to survive in a world that was against them.

Yet, quoting an anonymous Russian commander fighting against the jihad, he said, “How do you defeat an enemy who looks into the barrel of a gun and sees paradise?” Ali said that while over 700,000 Muslims have been killed in the war no one says anything, but if one American was killed, it becomes a war.

Meanwhile, friends of Mikail remembers him as being “popular, brave and someone who could take chances.” Mikail attended El Socorro Islamia TIA Primary School and Barataria South Secondary.

One colleague said Mikail and his brother were not the only two who left to join in the fight.

He said they were associated with a mosque in Cunupia, the membership of which appeared fractured on the issue of IS.

“It is a whole set who gone,” he said, noting that from San Juan alone about 50 people or more have gone over the past two to three years.

“Many are brilliant guys. They leave to go to one destination, then make their way to Syria,” one man said, noting that just “a few days ago” one of his friends came crying to him telling him that his son was leaving to go and fight for IS, and he could not change his son’s mind.