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(TOKYO) – A Japanese journalist released from captivity in Syria said he was happy to return home after living in "hell" for more than three years, but worried about how it would catch up with a changing world.
Kidnapped in 2015 by Syria's al Qaeda branch, Jumpei Yasuda is expected to return home on Thursday after being released and taken to Turkey this week.
"I am so happy to be free," he told NHK's Japanese television during a flight connecting Antakya, in southern Turkey, to Istanbul. "But I'm a little worried about what will happen to me or what I should do from now on."
Yasuda said that he felt like he had fallen behind the rest of the world and that he did not know how to catch up.
Yasuda described his 40 months of captivity as "a hell" both physically and mentally. He was kept in a tiny cell and tortured. There was a time when he was not allowed to wash for eight months.
"Day after day, I thought," Oh, I will not be able to go home anymore, "and that thought held me in the head and made me hard to control myself," he said.
Yasuda was kidnapped by the group known at the time as Front Nusra. A war watchdog said it was recently detained by a Syrian commander of the Islamic Party of Turkistan, composed mainly of Chinese jihadists in Syria.
Yasuda stated that he thought he had been displaced several times during his captivity, but that he had remained in the Idlib province, in northwestern Syria, where attacks at the bomb were rare.
"I lived in the infinite fear of never leaving or being killed," Yasuda told another Japanese broadcaster, TBS.
His release on Tuesday suddenly came as his captors drove him to the border with Turkey, deposed him and handed over to the Turkish authorities, he said.
Japanese officials said Qatar and Turkey had helped Yasuda's release, but did not know their exact role.
A respected journalist who began his career in a local newspaper, Yasuda began covering the Middle East in the early 2000s. Hijacked in Iraq in 2004 with three other Japanese, he was released after church clergymen. Islam had negotiated his release.
His latest work in Syria was on his friend Kenji Goto, a Japanese journalist who was taken hostage and killed by the Islamic State group.
Syria is one of the most dangerous places for journalists since the beginning of the conflict in March 2011, with dozens of deaths or kidnappings.
Several journalists are still missing in Syria and their fate is unknown.
