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Islam Yaken, a wealthy young Egyptian who left his homeland to join the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in the summer, has been killed in a suicide mission in the Syrian conflict town of Kobane, Egyptian media reported on Monday.
Yaken - who according to friends had lived a cosmopolitan lifestyle back home in Egypt - bewildered many when he joined the extremist militants. A photo of him published on social media networks in August showed him brandishing a sword while mounted on a horse in Syria.
Before taking his life in a Kobane suicide operation, he had published a final letter on Twitter on Nov. 21.
“I ask almighty God not to be one of those meant in the verse ‘And We will regard what they have done of deeds and make them as dust dispersed’ or be one of ‘those whose effort is lost in worldly life, while they think that they are doing well in work,’” Yaken addressed his comrades in the letter.
Born into a wealthy family, Yaken went to high school at the French Lycée la Liberté in Héliopolis and graduated in 2009.
As a multilingual student, he then went to Ain Shams University for a Law degree, which he completed in 2013.
An investigation by Al Arabiya News Channel revealed that as a schoolboy, he was considered normal and non-violent, yet was not very successful academically.
When Yaken graduated from school, he started to become interesting in bodybuilding, and regularly practiced sports.
“He was aged 17 when he first came to the gym,” the director of the gym where Yaken had trained told Al Arabiya News Channel, who added that despite being respectable, polite and honest, he believed the youth was looking for fame.
With his hard, consistent work in the gym, the beefed-up Yaken would take photographs of himself at the gym and immediately upload them on Facebook, the gym director added
