By: Norma Costello, Michael O’Farrell
DETAINED fighter Joshua Molloy told his mother yesterday not to worry about him in a phonecall arranged after the Irish Mail on Sunday visited him in an Iraqi prison.
The former British army soldier from Laois (pictured right) who fought Isis in Syria told the MOS from a prison in Erbil, northern Iraq, that he was okay, but he didn’t know when he was going to be able to go home.
He then surprised his mother with a phonecall on a prison official’s phone. Anna Marie Farrell-Molloy told the MOS she almost missed the call because she was driving at the time. She had to pull in and fumble to answer the phone.
She was stunned to hear the voice of her son – who was captured crossing into Kurd-controlled northern Iraq last week – casually greeting her: ‘Any news?’ ‘He said to me, “Don’t worry Mom, I’ll be okay,” she said speaking from her home in Ballylinan, Co. Laois, yesterday.
Joshua told the MOS he is in a cell with up to 50 other people but that he is being fed and has access to medicine in prison where he is being detained for illegally crossing the Syria-Iraq border after spending nine months fighting Isis alongside the embattled Yazidi minority.
‘I just want to know when I’m going home,’ he said. He also spoke briefly of the horrors he had seen Isis perpetrate. ‘When you’re that close to them and you see what they are doing, when you see the reality of it, we witnessed so many awful things, the children – you can’t imagine it…’ His parents Anna Marie and Declan were overjoyed at the first contact from their son since his capture last week.
‘We were delighted to hear he was okay and we are eternally grateful as a family,’ said Mr Molloy. ‘The only number he still has in his head is his mother’s mobile, so he rang her. I was sitting here staring at my phone all morning and my wife went into town to do some shopping and she got about a half a mile and pulled in to take the call.
‘Then she called me back from the roadside and said, “I’ve just spoken to Joshua.” ‘She was thrilled and surprised and I was tearing up, because you have all sorts of things in your head, you know.’
Joshua: I just wanted to go home
Frail and in rags, he tells would-be fighters: ‘Do not go to Syria’
By Norma Connolly – in Erbil, Iraq
IN A a newly built prison close to the centre of the city of Erbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan, Joshua Molloy awaits news of his release. The giant grey maze has been his home for over a week after he was arrested crossing illegally into the country from Syria.
The 24-year-old from Ballylinan, Co. Laois, a former soldier in the British army, had been fighting with the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) in Syria for nine months and was on his way home.
He was fighting in a Kurdish region near the Iraq/Turkey border known locally as Rojava – the Kurds call it western Kurdistan. He also fought in Qamishli, the ‘capital’ of the newly self-declared Kurdish federation in Syria – where in recent days 26 people have died in a fresh outbreak of violence, which came to an uneasy truce yesterday.
He came to help in the liberation of Singal (Sinjar) in November last year. This is the area where thousands of Yazidi men and women were killed by Isis. It is also where Isis kidnapped thousands of women to be used as sex slaves, sold in slave markets in Raqqa and Mosul.
Until his capture by Kurdish interior security at the border – along with fellow YPG fighters, Britons Jac Holmes and Joe Akerman – he had been in many Isis hotspots.
I wait in the prison manager’s office and drink tea until a prison worker in traditional Kurdish dress enters with a tall, gaunt man wearing dirty black pants, a grey jumper and plastic sandals.
Joshua Molloy is softly spoken. He appears frail and exhausted. ‘I just want to know when I’m going home,’ he says quietly – the prison officials say he should be released in the next few days.
‘What about my friends? Will they be okay, too?’ he asks the officers. They say all will be released together.
When I ask about conditions in the prison, he says: ‘I’ve been kept in a cell with lots of other people; it’s a cage,’ but he adds that he has not been physically assaulted.
‘We knew we could get arrested.
We knew that people had been put in prison crossing in; that’s why we called the consulate beforehand,’ he says of the illegal border crossing frequently used by foreign fighters that put him in breach of Iraq’s visa regulations.
Why did he decide to leave home and join the fight against Isis thousands of miles away? His intense blue eyes hold my gaze firmly as the ragged figure before me explains his case.
‘I was in the British army and I read what the Kurds were doing, fighting to protect innocent people in the face of Isis. All those terrible things were happening to the Yazidis and we weren’t doing anything about it, so I decided to come and help them,’ he says.
Sitting back, he falls silent until I mention that I met some fighters who knew him. He enquires after them. When I mention his reputation as a trusted fighter among the Kurds, he looks embarrassed.
‘I had training. I had been in the army before but when I went there, I went through their training too like everyone else. There are a lot of foreign fighters with good experience but we go through training with civilians,’ he says.
Thin and unkempt, he looks at the ground saying: ‘They’re feeding us here, so that’s okay. I am thin from my time in Syria. I was there for nine months. I just wanted to go home.’ He withdraws into silence again for a while before asking anxiously whether he’ll have to pay a fine for breaking the conditions of his visa.
‘I heard I have to pay. I’ll have to figure out a way to pay it. I’m so worried about this. I don’t know. We don’t know anything in here. No one is telling us what’s happening,’ he says before asking if I had heard from the Irish Government.
His drawn face changes as he speaks with intensity about what Isis is doing there in Syria. ‘When you’re that close to them and you see what they are doing, when you see the reality of it, we witnessed so many awful things, the children – you can’t imagine it…’ he trails off before asking again about his release, seemingly uncomfortable as he eyes up the prison staff.
The prison manager asks if he would like to call his family. On an old Nokia phone he makes the call home, the first time he has spoken to them since his arrest.
‘I’m fine,’ he assures them, asking if there is any news at home. He pauses and says quietly, ‘No, I want to hear it,’ his face flushes for a second and he seems acutely aware of the others in the room.
After a few minutes the prison staff ask me to reassure his mother he is okay. Anna-Marie Molloy seems breathless on the other end of the phone and thanks me over and over again as we end the call.
The prison manager checks his watch and indicates our time is up.
I give Joshua a copy of Ulysses I bought in one of Erbil’s only English-language bookshops. He smiles for the first time and I joke that he’s lucky they let me bring in shampoo as he clearly hasn’t changed in weeks. He relaxes for a brief moment and laughs but his demeanour quickly becomes serious again when I ask if he has a message for other fighters thinking of making the trip to Syria.
‘Tell them don’t go. Just don’t go,’ he says emphatically as he’s led back to the cell he shares with 50 others.
