American ISIS fighter reportedly captured in Iraq
Kurdish forces captured an American Islamic State (ISIS) fighter in northern Iraq on Monday, according to reports from Kurdish officials.
The man is identified as Virginia-born Muhammad Jamal Amin. His father is Palestinian and his mother is from Mosul, Iraq. He appears to have been carrying a Virginia driver's license with him when he was taken into custody.
Kurdish news outlet Rudaw reported that he thought he was near the Turkish border when he was captured by their forces.
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Maj. Gen. Feisal Helkani of the Peshmerga forces said Amin surrendered on Monday morning near the town of Sinjar, Iraq, which Iraqi forces retook from Islamic State fighters late last year.
Helkani says Amin was carrying a large amount of cash, three cell phones and three forms of identification, including the Virginia driver's license.
Amin had reportedly entered Syria from Turkey two months ago from where he had traveled to Mosul. A video that several Kurdish news outlets are sharing show Kurdish fighters interrogating a man identified as Amin.
The U.S. State Department said it is working to verify the reports that Kurdish fighters had captured a U.S. citizen/
Iraqi forces have struggled to retake ground from the Islamic State, which despite a series of territorial losses in Iraq and Syria in the past six months, still controls large swaths of land in both countries.
Additional information from the Associated Press.
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Megan Specia was Mashable's Assistant Real-Time News Editor and joined the team in September 2014. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism & Mass Communications from the University of New Hampshire after growing up in the Jersey 'burbs. She made her way to New York via a four year stopover in Dublin. Megan previously worked as a journalist and editor at Storyful in both Dublin and New York. Before all of that, though, her claim to fame was as head cake arranger and purveyor of all things sweet at Queen of Tarts cafe in Dublin, where she developed a serious addiction to macarons.
