News: ‘Brainwashed’ foreign medical students went to Syria

A boy from Syria. Image source timesofisrael

ONCE again, the lure of ISIS may have ensnared another group of foreigners this time, medical students suspected of traveling to Syria to work in ISIS-controlled hospitals.

The group of 11 people includes seven Britons, an American, a Canadian and two Sudanese, Turkish lawmaker Mehmet Ali Ediboglu told CNN on Sunday. Ediboglu, an opposition Turkish lawmaker, told The Observer that he had spoken with the students’ families, who were convinced their loved ones wanted to work for ISIS and were asking him for help tracking them down in neighboring Syria.

“They have been cheated, brainwashed. That is what I, and their relatives, think,” Ediboglu said, according to the newspaper. But he also stressed that the group did not travel with the intention of joining the battle.

“Let’s not forget about the fact that they are doctors,” he told The Observer. “They went there to help, not to fight.”

Eight of the groups are medical students who’ve just graduated and three others are in their final year of medical school, he said. They’d been studying in Khartoum, Sudan. Now, at least seven of their mothers and fathers are living near the Turkey-Syria border, pleading for their return, according to The Observer.

In an interview published yesterday in Turkey’s Hürriyet Daily News, the group of parents said they were worried and vowed not to leave Turkey without their children.