Tugay Sarac was just 15 when he first talked about traveling from Germany to Syria to fight for Islamic State.
But unlike his friends at the time, Sarac had turned to radical Islam as a way of avoiding coming to terms with his sexuality.
“I had friends who, like me, were really radical extremists and even considered going to Syria or to Palestine to fight,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a quiet corner of the prayer room of Berlin’s Ibn Rushd-Goethe mosque.
Now 20, Sarac, who was born in Berlin to a Turkish family, learned from an early age that homosexuality was wrong - and un-Islamic.
“I thought being gay is bad and that through Islam, by praying to God, I could cure myself and become normal. I started praying five times a day: I just felt bad, like I was dirty or inferior somehow ... I was really ashamed of my gay thoughts.” [Reuters] Read more
