Young Brits Join the Jihad in Syria
Maclean’s
By: Katie Engelhart
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Early last year, two young men from Birmingham, Mohammed Nahin Ahmed and Yusuf Zubair Sarwar, left Britain for Syria, where police believe they spent eight months fighting with the al Nusra Front, a group affiliated with al-Qaeda. Sarwar, a part-time computer science student, said he was on a class trip to Turkey. Soon after he left, his family found a six-page letter in which he admitted that he had gone “to do jihad” and to “die as a martyr.” His mother alerted detectives.
The trip was months in the making. Ahmed and Sarwar chatted online with overseas extremists. They ordered reading material from Amazon: Islam for Dummies and The Koran for Dummies. In January, they flew home and were greeted at Heathrow Airport by counterterrorism officials. In early July, both pleaded guilty to terrorism offences.
British citizens are heeding calls to join the fight, the majority with rebel groups and “increasingly, with the most extreme among them,” according to The Soufan Group, a New York-based intelligence firm. Some want to help with what they perceive to be a larger Islamist struggle. Others just want to bring down the government of President Bashar al-Assad (which, as early as 2012, Cameron accused of “butchering its own people” with “medieval barbarity”)…
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