Francesco Cascio
Francesco Cascio was born in 1990 in Erice, Sicily, and lived most of his life in the province of Trapani, in Sicily. Francesco was a troubled man, and in his youth, he had undergone compulsory care treatment due to psychiatric issues. It is unclear when and how exactly he started his radicalisation process, but when he met his would-be wife, Lara Bombonati, in 2011, he had already converted to Islam, at which point he changed his name to Muhammad. Cascio was also responsible for the conversion and radicalisation of his wife.
During his radicalisation, Cascio, along with his wife, was accompanied by other radicalised Italian individuals: Lazzaro Giuseppe Andrea, Delnevo Ibrahim Giuliano, and Randazzo Filippo. With these people, he kept in contact also through the online forum “Discussions on Islam”. When, in 2013, Delnevo was killed while fighting in Syria, Cascio and the others decided to go to Birmingham, officially, to study the Quran and the Arab language. Considering the density of radical Islamists in the British city, it is very possible that this trip might have influenced their further radicalisation.
He preceded his wife in Turkey on the 20th of June 2014. For 2 years they lived in Istanbul, where they were financially supported by Cascio’s parents; so much so that they would also end up paying for Randazzo’s and Lazzaro’s trip to Turkey. In Istanbul they were sometimes visited by their relatives, and the couple would also sometimes go back to Italy to visit them. In this period, as the Turkish police would only later notice, Cascio would also become a terrorist suspect for Interpol.
On the 13th of October 2016 the couple switched off their phones and soon after crossed the Syrian border. On that same day, their families back in Italy reported their disappearance to the police.
An analysis of Cascio’s phone records showed, that his Turkish number was frequently active in the regions of Idlib and Aleppo. On the other hand, from investigations conducted on his wife, it emerged that once in Syria, they separated, his wife going on to provide assistance to the jihadist commander Abou Munir – in a formation that would later sever its ties with al-Qaeda and become known as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham – while he would go on to fight. From a conversation that his wife Lara had with his mother, it emerged that Francesco was afraid of shooting at people, and while he was in feverish search for martyrdom (with him contemplating of fighting also in Palestine, Sudan, and Somalia), he would often find excuses to postpone the fighting. At this point, his wife intimidated him into going to the frontlines and “doing his duty”.
During a conversation between Lara and Francesco’s mother, it emerged that in February 2017, when she had been already repatriated to Italy, her commander Abou Munir had informed her that Francesco had been killed on the 26th of December during a raid of the Syrian army.
It is also true that, according to her phone records, just days before Lara’s arrest on January 15th 2017, by the Turkish border police, she had called Francesco’s Turkish number.