Another Trinidadian captured in Syr­ia fighting for ISIS

Zaid Abed al-Hamid, 35, has been captured fighting for ISIS in Syria.
Zaid Abed al-Hamid, 35, has been captured fighting for ISIS in Syria.

(Trinidad Guardian) One of the men who ap­peared in an ISIS video speak­ing about life in Trinidad and To­ba­go has been cap­tured fight­ing with ISIS in Syr­ia.

Sev­er­al in­ter­na­tion­al news agen­cies, in­clud­ing the BBC and New York Times named him as 35-year-old Zaid Abed al-Hamid.

The U.S-backed Syr­i­an De­mo­c­ra­t­ic Forces con­firmed the cap­ture on Sun­day.

Al-Hamid is be­lieved to have had dual cit­i­zen­ship, as he spent sev­er­al years liv­ing in the Unit­ed States.

The New York Times re­ports that his name ap­pears in a data­base of 130 Trinida­di­ans who joined the Is­lam­ic State that is main­tained by Si­mon Cot­tee, a se­nior lec­tur­er in crim­i­nol­o­gy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Kent who tracks the group.

Cot­tee is work­ing on a book about ISIS fight­ers from the Caribbean na­tion.

Hamid had been iden­ti­fied as an ex­trem­ist since at least 2011, the re­port said.

Ac­cord­ing to Cot­tee’s data­base, Hamid joined the ter­ror­ist group on April 6, 2014, along with his wife and his three chil­dren.

He ap­peared in an ISIS video, sit­ting by a stream, speak­ing about how his fam­i­ly could not prac­tice their faith in Trinidad.

The news­pa­per re­port­ed that a sim­i­lar­ly spelled name — Zaid Ab­dul-Hamid — ap­pears in a cache of ISIS reg­is­tra­tion forms in­di­cat­ing that he pro­vid­ed a ref­er­ence for a re­cruit from Trinidad and To­ba­go when that re­cruit joined the group in 2014.

The form in­di­cates that Ab­dul-Hamid was in Raqqa, Syr­ia, at that time.

The oth­er per­son cap­tured has been iden­ti­fied as 34-year-old War­ren Christo­pher Clark, aka Abu Mo­ham­mad al-Ameri­ki, who for­mer­ly taught in Texas.