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raveling home to Indonesia from war-torn Syria after joining the Islamic State (IS) movement was easy, says a recent returnee.

In an interview with The Jakarta Post on Tuesday, former IS fighter Ahmad Junaedi said he received permission to return to his hometown of Malang, East Java, last September '€” and was surprised to find how easy it was to make the return trip.

The meatball seller said all he needed was a permission slip from one of the IS leaders to retrieve his passport from a small village near the city of Al-Bab in Syria to end his five-month stint as a member of the Islamic State (IS) movement.

'€œAfter picking up my clothes and passport, I traveled to the city of Jarabulus, which borders Turkey,'€ he said. Jarabulus came under IS control in January last year.

When Junaedi requested permission to leave Syria last August, his superiors said he could do so only if he revoked his oath to IS and promised never to return to IS territory, or risk being killed as a spy.

Junaedi said he had had no thoughts of returning once he crossed the border from Jarabulus to the Turkish town of Karkamis, which was free of barbed-wire, unlike his first crossing from Gaziantep, Turkey, into Aleppo, Syria.

Junaedi then traveled to Gaziantep, where he bought a US$100 plane ticket to Istanbul before buying another ticket to Kuala Lumpur.

He then transited in Jakarta before arriving in Surabaya, where he took a bus to Malang with money his family had transferred to his bank account.

Although Junaedi spent the entirety of his IS salary to finance his return trip, he said his return was without incident until his arrest last week.

'€œI'€™m just glad I got home. I just want to live a normal life again,'€ he said.

Separately, National Police spokesman Sr. Comr. Rikwanto said Junaedi was able to slip back into the country because it was impossible for police to monitor everyone traveling from Istanbul to Jakarta through Kuala Lumpur '€” the route typically taken by those traveling to and from Syria.

'€œThere are so many Muslims in Southeast Asia; Malaysia and Brunei are also Muslim-majority countries. It is impossible for us to monitor every single person coming from there,'€ he told The Jakarta Post on Wednesday.

Due to the difficulty of tracking those returning from Syria, Rikwanto said police were now focused on '€œpreventing Indonesians from traveling to join IS instead of focusing on returnees'€.

Unlike in Malaysia and Singapore, where IS supporters can be charged and detained upon their departure to the combat zone, local authorities still have no legal basis to detain those suspected of leaving to join IS, despite the government'€™s vocal condemnation of the terrorist group.

Rikwanto also confirmed that Junaedi and two others arrested in Malang last week '€” Helmi Muhammad Alamudi and Abdul Hakim Munabari '€” had been named suspects and were being detained at the police'€™s Mobile Brigade headquarters in Kelapa Dua, Depok, West Java.

He said Junaedi'€™s ability to evade detection for so long after his return from Syria indicated police had not carried out enough intelligence-gathering on potential terror suspects.