The man Nazir Nortei Alema, a University graduate, told them he had travelled to an Islamic State training camp.
Nazir’s becomes the first known recruit from the West African nation to join the militant group.
With a degree in Geography and Rural Development, he is one of the 10 suspected Muslim youth from Ghana who have finally taken the decision to join the terrorist grouping, whose stock-in-trade is public beheading of their opponents or those they regard as infidels, attracting a worldwide anger.
Their decision has activated the alarm bells over a subtle recruitment drive for vulnerable Muslim youth in especially public tertiary institutions in the country.
His brother, Kabiru Alema, said he and his parents were caught completely unawares.
“I noticed some changes in his posts on Facebook his teachings like, but I was ignorant about the ISIS flag because he used ISIS flag on his WhatsApp, he used some pictures of some Arab guy on a horse with a sword but it never occurred to us he will do such a thing because I was ignorant about ISIS,” Kabiru Alema said.
“We are devastated. Since the news came his mother has been crying,” Alema’s father Abdul Latif Alema told Reuters, adding that he believed Islamic State should be crushed.
About a third of Ghana’s population of 27 million is Muslim. They co-exist peacefully with the Christian majority and have so far apparently avoided the influence of the kinds of radical Islam that have taken root in neighbouring Nigeria and Mali.
Alema, a university student, spent much of his spare time online and it is almost certain he was radicalised through his interactions on Facebook rather than through anything taught in mosques in the Osu neighbourhood of Ghana’s capital, his family and friends said.
He finished a government internship in July and had initially told his parents he was travelling from his home in Accra to Prestea, a mining town in the west of the country.
“Two weeks later on Aug. 16, we got a Whatsapp message from him saying he was at a training ground to join the Islamic State group in an unknown country,” his brother Kabiru Alema told Reuters.
Thousands of foreigners from more than 80 nations have joined the ranks of Islamic State and other radical groups in Syria and Iraq.
Nigeria’s Boko Haram, West Africa’s deadliest Islamist militant group, swore allegiance to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in March.
Sheikh Armiyawo Shaibu, adviser to Ghana’s chief Imam, condemned Nazir Alema’s claims that he was joining the militant group to fulfil God’s work.
CCTV Africa
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