LONDON—The knife-wielding militant who appears in a string of grisly beheading videos, his face concealed by a black balaclava and speaking in British-accented English, has come to personify the brutality of the extremist group Islamic State (IS).
Nicknamed “Jihadi John” in the world’s media, he was unmasked on Thursday as Mohammed Emwazi, who is in his mid-20s and was born in Kuwait, raised in West London and studied computer programming at the University of Westminster.
The apparent transformation of Emwazi—described as a man who once had been kind and soft-spoken—into the face of ruthless extremism raised new questions about the allure of IS and Britain’s role as an incubator of Islamist militancy.
Emwazi apparently had been on the radar of British authorities for years before he left for Syria around 2013. The revelation of his identity marks Emwazi as the latest in a string of homegrown British radicals:
In December 2001 British-born Richard Reid boarded an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami with explosives hidden in his shoes, which he tried unsuccessfully to detonate. In July 2005 four suicide bombers struck the London underground system and a bus, killing 52 people and wounded more than 700.
The following year, police foiled a plot to use liquid explosives to blow up seven airliners flying from Britain to the US and Canada; eight British residents were convicted for their roles. Such incidents have led to stepped-up counterterrorism efforts, including the more aggressive pursuit of known radicals whom authorities had previously allowed to operate comparatively freely in hopes of winning them over or gleaning valuable intelligence.
Police credit the new approach with averting four or five suspected terrorist plots in 2014 and at least one a year for several years before that.
But an advocacy group that assists British Muslims in trouble with the security services suggested on Thursday that authorities’ heavy-handed approach to Emwazi may have driven him into the arms of IS.
“The Mohammed I knew was extremely kind, extremely gentle, extremely soft-spoken,” CAGE research director Asim Qureshi told reporters, a description dramatically at odds with the violence portrayed in IS propaganda and recounted by the group’s former hostages.
Qureshi said Emwazi first contacted CAGE when he was detained in Tanzania with two friends in the summer of 2009 and sent back to Britain, interrupting what he said was a vacation after completing his studies. Suspected of attempting to join the Somali militant group Shabab, Emwazi was repeatedly questioned by British security officers, who on one occasion, he alleged, threw him against a wall, grabbed at his beard and choked him.
Officers with MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, also asked Emwazi whether he was willing to become an informant, Qureshi said.
The attention of the British authorities later prevented Emwazi from moving to Kuwait, where he said he had a job waiting, and cost him two fiancées, Qureshi said.
“I wish that things could have turned out differently for him and for many other people,” Qureshi said. “When are we going to finally learn that when we treat people as outsiders they will feel like outsiders and they will look for belonging elsewhere?” The British government and security services declined to discuss the claims, but an organization familiar with Emwazi’s case disputed CAGE’s version of Emwazi’s radicalization.
Haras Rafiq, managing director of the Quilliam Foundation, which was founded by former militants to counter the recruiting efforts of Islamist extremists, said it had evidence that Emwazi was involved with a network of people whose movements were restricted because of links to Shabab. “MI5 does not intervene unless they have evidence,” Rafiq said. He declined to elaborate.
Los Angeles Times/TNS
Image credits: Ropi/Zuma Press/TNS