'I would do it all again': Member of ISIS cell 'The Beatles' seethes with hatred for West but wants trial in UK

A captured British member of Islamic State's notorious beheading cell "The Beatles" has told a journalist about his interrogations at the hands of US intelligence officials, and detailed his particular dislike of FBI agents.

El Shafee Elsheikh expressed his hatred of the West and showed little remorse for atrocities committed by IS during a remarkably intimate and sometimes terse interview with Dubai-based reporter Jenan Moussa.

The conversation with Elsheikh, who is now being detained in a Kurdish security centre, traversed his support for slavery of women, the supposed corruption of the West and murdered Beatles frontman John Lennon.

Nicknamed "The Beatles" because surviving captives spoke of their British accents, the small ISIS cell was infamously led by Jihadi John, a British man acting as chief executioner until killed by a drone strike in Raqqa in 2015.

Elsheikh said his day now revolves around a monotonous cycle of eating, sleeping and waiting to be interrogated, since he was captured in January in eastern Syria by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.

US Department of Defence officials, the FBI and a number of other intelligence agencies have all moved in at various times to interview him, Elsheikh said.

He claimed he was being treated "fine, not bad".

Elsheikh said FBI agents were the "least respectable" out of all the organisations who were trying to glean information from him.

When asked by Mousa about "The Beatles" moniker, a dismissive Elsheikh replied: "I don't listen to music so I'd rather not speak about it.

"John Lennon wouldn't like it [the nickname] much."

Elsheikh said, "The Beatles" tag was just "media blabber", which he had first heard about while in the Syrian city of Raqqa, Islamic State's once self-declared capital.

Sat in a chair less than half-a-metre from a completely unbound and unshackled Elsheikh, Mousa later wrote on Twitter she was "worried" about being so close to him.

"I asked guards if they searched him" for items such as razor blades, Mousa wrote.

Mousa added she was struck by Elsheikh's anger and lack of remorse, as he sat, with no beard, in a faux leather brown chair positioned in a plain white room.

"He never looked me in the eye. It was like I wasn't there," she wrote.

"He told me that if time goes back to 2012, 'I would do it all over again'."

Elsheikh, whose family came to Britain from Sudan when he was a child, was a mechanic from White City in west London.

He travelled to Syria in 2012, initially joining al-Qaida's branch before moving on to IS, according to the US State Department.

US State Department documents Elsheikh had "earned a reputation for waterboarding, mock executions and crucifixions while serving as an (IS) jailer".

Mousa said Elsheikh told her that he wanted to be moved to the United Kingdom to face trial, but then hoped to live in Sudan.

Islamic State's beheadings, often carried out on camera, horrified the world soon after the extremist group took over much of Iraq and Syria in 2014.

The group also committed widescale atrocities including massacring thousands of Iraqi troops and civilians and taking sex slaves.

-- With AP