Abu Chiad boasted about beheading infidels, raping women and children and slaughtering in the name of Islam. Speaking from a prison in the city of Kirkuk, in northern Iraq, he told Dr. Jan Kizilhan that these acts would get him to heaven.
Kizilhan, 49, a German of Kurdish background, is a psychology professor and trauma expert who has worked with trauma victims in Rwanda and Kosovo. He went to Iraq with Michael Blume, minority affairs expert for the German state of Baden-Wurttemberg, to help the victims of ISIS. Their mission was to bring traumatized women and children back to Germany for treatment. Fox News ran a story about this trauma expert hero on a mission to recount ISIS horror stories.
In a telephone interview, Blume said he eagerly took advantage of an opportunity to save a thousand lives.
Baden-Wurttemberg has authorized $107 million over three years for this humanitarian work in response to an appeal from the 100,000-member German-Yazidi community following the ISIS massacre two years ago of Yazidis in the Sinjar region of northern Iraq. The Yazidis are an ancient non-Muslim minority in Iraq. They've lived in the Sinjar region for centuries.
Chiad, a 26-year old Chechen, had moved his wife and three children to Raqqa, Syria, to join the fight to create an Islamic State across Syria and Iraq. He embraced the ethnic cleansing that was intended to rid the region of Christians, Jews, non-Sunni Muslims and Yazidis.
"I asked Abu Chiad how he could show love for his wife and children and murder people the same day," Kizilhan said in a phone interview from Stuttgart.
He said Chiad showed no remorse as he spoke about making daily trips to a marketplace to behead people and rape Yazidi women, after which he would return home as a loving father and husband.
"Killing them was like killing a chicken," Chiad told Kizilhan.
In Chiad's mind, Kizilhan said, the victims were not human. He said ISIS killers and rapists rationalize their behavior by dehumanizing their victims, much as the Nazis justified their mass slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust. He has written a book, "The Psychology of ISIS," in which he analyzes this savage behavior. It will be published in Germany in October.
Kizilhan had horrifying stories to tell about the 1,100 women and children, former ISIS captives, who are now being treated in Germany, most of them at a facility near Stuttgart in Baden-Wurttenberg.
The Gospel Herald previously reported that the Middle East Media Research Institute features an Islamic State (ISIS) video released online on September 6, 2016 showcased a shari'a school that it operates in its Al-Khayr Province, featuring its young pupils - "the cubs of the Caliphate" - discussing their aspirations of martyrdom, instructing citizens on approved clothing and grooming, and fighting on the front lines. The video states that these children will "become the vanguard of the army of the Caliphate, Allah willing, and... the generation that will conquer Damascus, Baghdad, Jerusalem, Mecca, Al-Madina, Dabiq, Rome, and Andalusia."
Kizilhan said Rinda often asks how ISIS can do such terrible things, how people can be so evil.
The Daily Mail ran a story in August of last year detailing how an ISIS prisoner was 'executed by a child who shoots handcuffed man in the head." This kind of brutality is common when associated by ISIS.
"I ask the same question," he said. "Why is humanity still so evil in the 21st century?"
