The IS man who begged for death ... and got it

SURUC, Turkey: Kurdish grocer Cuneyt Hemo remembers the moment he crossed paths with a Islamic State (IS) prisoner inside the besieged Syrian town of Kobani.
“He begged us to kill him so he could go to paradise and be rewarded,” Hemo told AFP, in a rare glimpse of life inside the town.
“We captured him in the street,” said Hemo, dragging on a cigarette in the Turkish border town of Suruc, where along with other Kobani refugees, he has found sanctuary.
“He said he came from Azerbaijan. He was in his 20s and spoke to us in Arabic,” he added. The fighter was dressed in full camouflage gear.
The bearded fighter explained at length to his captors how he had come to Kobani to “deliver it from the kuffar” (the infidels). “We asked him why the militants were attacking us. He replied that we were kuffar (the infidels) and they had received the order to put us on the path of true Islam,” he said.
Attempting to show the captured man that they were all adherents of the same religion, Hemo said that the YPG fighters took the man to a mosque in Kobani.
But even as a captive, the man remained inflexible, he said. “We tried in vain to help him find reason. But he did not want to know anything,” said Hemo. “He said again and again that we were the infidel and he wanted to go to paradise,” he added.
When his captors offered him something to eat and drink, the man refused and said that should he manage to escape he would blow himself up like his “brother” suicide bombers.
Hemo said he had still not understood the stubbornness of the militant and his disdain for death. “He told us several times that he was happy for his brothers who had become martyrs and he would join them in paradise.”
The Pentagon said on Wednesday it believed that US-led air strikes had killed “several hundred” IS fighters in and around Kobani, but warned it was still possible that the town could fall.
Hemo said that in the end the prisoner was killed by his captors with a shot to the head, although it has not been possible to independently verify the account. He said that there had been no initial plan to kill the militant but concern had grown among the YPG fighters as the extent of his fanaticism became clear.
“He was not scared of death,” Hemo said, adding he was shot in the street the day after he was captured.