ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — Kurdish forces revealed on Wednesday they had detained a Syrian-born German national in northern Syria; the man had lived in Hamburg with one of the masterminds of the September 11th attacks.
"Mohammed Haydar Zammar has been arrested by Kurdish security forces in northern Syria and is now being interrogated," a top Kurdish commander told AFP.
No other details were immediately announced by the Kurdish-led People's Protection Units (YPG), the dominant armed force in northern and eastern Syria. They are a part of the US-led international anti-ISIS coalition's Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The coalition includes Germany.
Zammar has been in SDF custody for more than a month.
“We can confirm that Mohammad Haydar Zammar, a Syrian-born German national, was captured more than a month ago by SDF partners as part of their ongoing operations to defeat ISIS inside Syria,” Pentagon spokesman Eric Pahon told Reuters, using another term for ISIS.
There are approximately 2,000 US forces in Syria.
Zammar had lived with Mohammed Atta on Bilser Street in Hamburg, the Germany daily Der Spiegel reported. Atta, an Egyptian, was one of the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 11 that crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
The German newspaper describes Zammar as a recruiter for al-Qaeda in Europe who was under surveillance by German authorities and made frequent trips to Afghanistan in the mid-1990s.
Six days after the 9/11 attacks, he appeared before a district court in Hamburg and told the judge, "The only law binding me to testify here is Islamic law," Der Spiegel reported.
Zammar went to Morocco in December 2001. He was there captured by Moroccan authorities with the assistance of CIA agents and deported to Syria. The Washington Post reported in 2002 that the Syrian government cooperated with the United States in his subsequent arrest and interrogation.
In 2007, a Syrian court sentenced him to 12 years in prison on charges of belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood. He was held at Far Falastin prison in Damascus. When the Syrian conflict broke out in 2011, many prisoners were released or escaped.
Zammar is now in his mid-50s. It is not clear whether he currently has an allegiance to an extremist group. Al-Qaeda formally broke off ties with its Jabhet al-Nusra Front affiliate in 2016.
Many foreign fighters, especially European nationals, have tried to flee through Turkey.
The US and German governments did not provide any immediate statements regarding the situation.
Last updated at 8:45 a.m., April 20, 2018
