By Nawzad Mahmoud

SULAIMANI, Kurdistan Region – “I disown him,” a Kurdish mother in a Sulaimani neighborhood utters, as she remembers the crime committed by her son: in an ISIS video, Shwan Bakhtiyar points a handgun at the head of a captive Peshmerga, killing him execution style.

“Shalaw never talked about religion before, how could I tell that he had joined Daesh?” she bemoans, referring to her son by his nickname and ISIS by its Arabic acronym.

The mother, who does not want to give her name out of shame and insists on being identified only by the initials SM, says she cannot hold her head high anymore: all around her in the Kurdistan Region men and women are either joining the Peshmerga or praying for their success in the war with ISIS.

S.M. says her son was a quiet sort, and that his friends were the same: “When his friends visited at home, they did not talk to anyone either.”

Shwan’s sister says she shares in her mother’s shame, unable to face school any longer.

“How can I go to school now, what would people think about me?” She says her brother was not very conservative at home, never interfering in how she dressed. “He was very busy on the internet when he was at home.”

Last September, Shwan left his home and did not return. “We thought he went to Saudi Arabia to study, because he stopped going to the school here,” his mother says.

It was only after watching the ISIS video uploaded on the Internet more than a week ago, showing her son shoot a captive Peshmerga -- in a yellow jumpsuit and on the ground -- that she and the family were shocked to learn that Shwan had joined the Sunni Muslim extremists.

“I disown him, he is not my son,” his mother cries.

Shwan’s brother Muhammad is a volunteer Peshmerga, making the siblings enemies in a war that has killed well over 1,000 Kurdish soldiers, most in clashes.

Shwan was a fourth year student in the Institute of Islamic Sciences in Sulaimani. One of his teachers says that Bakhtiyar stopped going to school for religious reasons.

Kemal Abubakir, a teacher at the Shafii Institute for Islamic Sciences in Sulaimani, remembers Shwan as a calm and quiet person: “He was not abnormal in any notable way; he was not a very good student.”

The former teacher says Shwan would wear his hair long, which was against school regulations. “But he refused to cut his hair and said it was recommended by religion. We told him that he should leave the school if he chose to break the regulations. He decided to keep his hair,” Abubakir says.

ISIS numbers have been reportedly swelling with recruits from around the world, including some from Kurdistan. It is not clear how many from the Islamic Institutes in Kurdistan have joined ISIS.

“This is the duty of the security agencies to investigate and reveal that information,” says Abubakir. “The Islamic political parties active in the political process in Kurdistan deny that they encourage people to join ISIS, but I am sure that there are individuals in those parties who do just that,” he adds.

“According to the information I have, 500 Kurdish youth have joined ISIS,” says Mariwan Naqishbandi, former media director at the Ministry of Endowment. “Eighty-five percent had studied in either public or private religious institutes or Islamic colleges at one stage of their lives,” he says.

Naqishbandi adds that 7,500 students in Kurdistan are studying at religious institutes, 2,000 of them females. “The mullahs do not support ISIS, so it is the preachers who encourage people to join ISIS. This is why ISIS has been attacking the mullahs of Kurdistan for a while now.”

Rudaw