Referring to dispatching of 16 Tunisian girls to Syria to be used as sex toys there by foreign-backed terrorists fighting the popular government of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, the Mufti of Tunisia said that calls for Jihad (Holy War) in Syria are a huge mistake, stressing that giving sexual services to terrorists under the name of religion is a form of prostitution and adultery.
“All information and reasons confirm that Tunisian youths who went to fight in Syria ‘were fooled and have been brainwashed’,” Al-Alam News Channel quoted Sheikh Othman Battikh, the Mufti of Tunisia, as saying.
“Calls for Jihad in Syria are a huge mistake since no Muslim is allowed to fight a Muslim brother. It is mandatory that those who seek to perform Jihad in Syria be talked into Jihad Akbar (The Greater Holy War) which is indeed fighting the meaner self,” the Mufti of Tunisia emphasized.
“There are two types of Jihad; Jihad for defense against occupiers and jihad with the meaner self which is considered as ‘Jihad Akbar’,” Sheikh Battikh pointed out.
“The Occupied Palestine is one of the territories for freedom of which jihad is required. However, this does not mean that one must necessarily leave for the land to perform Jihad in Palestine.
Rather, one could perform Jihad with the occupier enemy through supporting the Palestinian cause and giving support to its people,” he added.
According to media reports around 3000 Tunisians have been fighting in Syria, a significant number of whom have been killed. The Syrian army has also managed to snatch hundreds of these dispatched terrorists and put them in jail.
Other reports showed that there are organized networks who are recruiting Tunisian youths. First they’re transferred to Libya, then to Turkey to enter the battlefields in Syria. In addition, some reports say that Tunisian NGOs might be involved in these networks.
To this end, Tunisian Interior Minister Lofti Ben Jeddou announced on Friday that they had disintegrated several networks which used to dispatch Tunisian youths to Syria to assist insurgent groups.
Furthermore, Sheikh Othman Battikh, the Mufti of Tunisia, described the phenomenon of giving sexual services to terrorists fighting in Syria under the name of religion as a form of adultery and prostitution, stating that 16 Tunisian girls have been sent to Syria to perform this sham Jihad.
He called upon the Tunisian government to confront this “odd and dangerous” phenomenon. Improper dissemination of information and the Tunisian community’s lack of knowledge have led a number of Tunisian girls to go to Syria to fulfill this suspicious fatwa (religious verdict).
Regional experts hold that, unlike citizens of other Arab countries, Tunisian girls go to Syria to perform this suspicious fatwa because they are unaware of religious concepts.
The previous Tunisian secular and anti-religion regime used to even close Qur’an classes. A large number of mosques in the country had been shut down for long years. This had caused the people in the country to distance from Islamic teachings. Consequently, after the 2011 revolution, extremists, Salafists, and Wahhabis could easily play with public opinions and beliefs in the country. In that situation, they fooled a number of Tunisian youths and sent them to Syria to fight against the Syrian regime. Under such circumstances, a number of deceived Tunisian girls were also dispatched to Syria following a fatwa which required them to give sexual services to the terrorists in the country.