Last year, the cover of a karate magazine.
LM: It sounds like you went into the military in South Africa as a karate expert...does this mean that you "fast-tracked" through basic military training?
TS: I was recruited out of college by my professor, an American law professor. My fast-track was being thrown into the deep end, a sink or swim scenario as It was a pivotal time in South Africa's history and it suffered at the hands of terrorism. Regarding my recruitment, I would assume that karate played a part in it. I was young, on the South African national karate team and since he was my professor, he assessed my aptitude, which I gather must have worked for him. Often I would have a beer with him after class, that's when personality profiling etc happened. That was my fore into the intelligence world. My training was tradecraft and it was intense, there wasn't time to practice and run scenarios, I literally got thrown in. Later, I was trained by various different groups.
LM: You have fought against ISIS (Daesh) please help us understand, who are we fighting against here, Arabs, Muslims, Extremists?
TS: I was on ISIS front lines before Russia or the US were on the ground. We are not fighting Arabs. We are not fighting Muslims, we are fighting an extremist ideology. To quote Marx, it's a scenario of "religion being the opium of the people", extremist interpretations of doctrine.