The toll of extremism: 50 Britons killed fighting for Syria and Iraq militants


Joint research by Guardian and King’s College London shows oldest to die was Crawley suicide bomber and youngest was 16-year-old from Brighton
The profiles of some of the jihadis raise questions for UK security services. Photograph: Social media


Shiv Malik

@shivmalik

Wednesday 29 July 2015 13.00 BSTLast modified on Wednesday 29 July 201513.27 BST

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The British jihadis killed in Iraq and Syria

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Fifty Britons have been killed fighting for Islamist militants in Syria and Iraq over the last three years, research by the Guardian and experts from a London university has concluded.

The verified dead, who are all male, include at least eight teenagers. The youngest, Jaffar Deghayes from Brighton, is 16. His father said he died near Aleppo fighting for al-Qaida’s Syrian branch, Jabhat al-Nusra. The average age of the dead is 23.

A joint project with the thinktank the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR), based at King’s College London, the research also shows that the oldest to die was 41-year-old Abdul Waheed Majeed, a truck driver from Crawley, who was a suicide bomber for Jabhat al-Nusra. He drove a bomb-laden truck into a prison in Aleppo in February 2014.

Shiraz Maher, who heads the project at the thinktank, sa id ICSR’s data showed that the British role in the spreading conflict was both undeniable and prominent.

“It is clear that British foreign fighters are not in Syria to take a back seat in the conflict. They are full participants in the war, serving on the frontlines while also volunteering for some of the most risky combat roles available.”


The first Briton recorded as dead was Ibrahim Mazwagi in February 2013, just over a year after the civil war in Syria led to the emergence of a series of both Islamist and secular groups who rose up to fight the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

The conflict spread prominently to Iraq in 2014 after Isis used its base in the north-west of Syria to sweep through the neighbouring country and declare a caliphate. Isis has been most effective at attracting foreigners through disseminating hundreds of slickly produced videos and magazines.

In all, ICSR believes there are more than 700 Britons who have fought in the conflict at some point in the past three years.

Though ICSR’s fieldwork documents that the 50 militants have come from across Britain, from Aberdeen to east London, Maher says that clear clusters and patterns of behaviour are now emerging from the data.
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Often formed along both geographic and ethnic lines, these clusters of fighters include at least three British Somalis, three dead from Brighton andfive from Portsmouth including Asad Uzzaman, 25, an Isis fighter whose death, when reported this weekend, brought the total to 50. Several jihadis form a growing west London Arabic-speaking nexus.

“It is clear that individuals travel to Syria in clusters and usually fight together once there,” Maher said. “This is also apparent when studying the pattern of deaths. Where one individual from a particular cluster dies, you typically see some of their comrades dying around the same time.

“The Portsmouth grouping is just one example of this, with both Muhammad Mehdi Hassan and Manunur Mohammed Roshid dying in Kobani, Syria last year. This is also observable with other clusters from London, Brighton, and Coventry.

“By contrast, individuals who travel to Syria alone or with like-minded compatriots but who are not their close friends, are more likely to volunteer as suicide bombers,” Maher said.

Dead fighters appear to survive in combat for an average of 12 months and 10 days, with some participants not wanting to return. Seven British jihadis have willingly blown themselves up.

Last month the Guardian revealed that 17-year-old Talha Asmal became the UK’s youngest suicide bomber after detonating a vehicle fitted with explosives for Isis in the northern Iraqi town of Baiji. He had left West Yorkshire just two months previously.

Some of those killed, such as west Londoner Mohammed el-Araj had previous criminal convictions linked to extremism. He spent 18 months in prison after violently protesting outside the Israeli embassy in London in 2009. He was killed in Syria in mid-August 2013. Majeed, the suicide bomber from Crawley, was said to be a member of one of the UK’s most vociferously extremist groups, the now banned al-Muhajiroun.
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Those connections raise questions for UK security services about whether current methods of tracking the movements and intentions of known extremists are effective.

Of those killed, most joined Isis or Jabhat al-Nusra. One of the deadliest months of fighting for Britons was November 2014, in which Isis mounted attacks against Kurdish-held Kobani and attempted to hold and claim further territory in Iraq.


While 17 Britons have died fighting either the Assad regime in Syria or the Iraqi government, many of those recorded killed over the last two and a half years have been caught up in the complex web of insurgency politics, in a Syrian civil war which is now in its fifth year.

Four Britons have died in infighting between either Islamist or rebel groups. Nine have been reported killed in US air raids. Around five more were killed fighting Syria’s Kurds in the north-west of the country.


T he figures will bring Britain’s counter-extremism policy, known as Prevent, into sharper focus and follow on the heels of a speech by the prime minister last week, in which he described tackling extremist ideology as the “struggle of our generation”.


The UK’s independent terrorism legislation watchdog, David Anderson QC, said the numbers should further galvanise Muslim communities to combat a “false narrative of grievance”.


“This is proof, should it be needed, that those who travel to support this murderous cult threaten not only others but themselves,” he said. “The false narrative of grievance, and the perverted ideology of Isis, need to be robustly countered by all right-thinking people. There are many heartening examples of such counter-speech, including from Muslims whose voices tend to be the most effective. More are needed.”