Shaker Denies Role in Abra Battle, Wants to Return to 'Normal Life'

Former pop star turned Islamic militant Fadel Shaker, who has been on the run for nearly two years, has said he wants to return to his "normal, natural life" with his friends and family.

In an interview with LBCI TV released Saturday, Shaker also denied fighting alongside the gunmen of Islamist cleric Ahmed al-Asir in the fierce 2013 clashes with the army in the Sidon suburb of Abra. At least 18 soldiers and dozens of gunmen were killed in the fighting.

Shaker, who has now shaved his beard, said he "never carried a weapon."

The interview is one of the man's rare public appearances since a video uploaded to YouTube during the street fighting. In that video, he called his enemies pigs and dogs.

Shaker and more than 50 other suspected militants face charges of committing crimes against the military.

LBCI said the interview was filmed at the Ain el-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp near Sidon.

Though he grew to become one of the Arab world's most famous singers, Shaker suffered through a miserable childhood of poverty, which a onetime musician friend says helped lead him down a dark path later in life.

Now in his mid-forties, Shaker was born to a Palestinian mother and Lebanese father in the country's biggest Palestinian refugee camp, Ain al-Hilweh.

Born Fadel Shmandur, he began his career as a popular wedding singer who performed from the rooftops of the camp, an over-crowded and hopeless place.

In his prime, Shaker sang love songs that were instant region-wide hits. He released his first album in the late nineties, and continued to perform until 2011.

Shaker's brother had long been a strict Muslim, and he tried for years to convince him to leave music.

But it wasn't until after the outbreak of an uprising in Syria against President Bashar Assad that Shaker became convinced that singing is haram, or forbidden in Islam.

Shaker soon became the best-known face of Asir's small movement of openly sectarian, Sunni radicals and praised the cleric as "the lion of the Sunnis."