Isis’s British connections: the jihadists who want to bring the fight to the west

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/17/isis-british-connections-jihadists-bring-fight-to-west

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In June, we covered Isis’s “terrifying” online propaganda machine, which at the time included slick(ish) feature-length movies, and a well-organised battalion of tweeting fighters and supporters.

In the six months since, some of the former have died on the battlefield, one of the latter turned out to be an Indian tech executive living a middle-class life in Bangalore, and many more have had their accounts shut down.

But one tweeting jihadist has remained in the spotlight throughout. Back in June, one British fighter, the self-styled Abu Hussein al-Britani, had already achieved attention and notoriety for posting English-language jihadi slogans on social media. “One day the flag of tawheed will fly over 10 Downing Street and the White House,” read one typical message from Britani, in reference to the black flag commonly associated with Islamist movements. “Victory or death!” read another.

As the year wore on, Britani’s profile became more and more sinister. First, he was identified in the British media as Birmingham-born Junaid Hussein, 20, a computer hacker who had travelled to Syria while on police bail pending an investigation into accusations of violence. Then records revealed he already had a previous conviction: a six-month jail-term in 2012 for hacking information about Tony Blair and his family, while working with a gang of hackers called TeamPoison.

With few further facts known, Hussein became a repository for frenzied speculation. Journalists wondered if Hussein was one of the “Beatles”, the group of three British-born Isis fighters tasked with guarding hostages such as James Foley and Steven Sotloff, two of the men murdered on camera by Isis this summer. The Daily Mail later alleged he was masterminding a campaign to train fellow jihadists to hack celebrity and business bank accounts, in order to fund Isis’s work.

By September, Hussein was said to have enticed a wife to Syria – Christian convert and former Kent resident Sally Jones, 45. After an alleged online romance with Hussein in late 2013, Jonesreportedly converted to Islam and fled to Raqqa, Syria, with a child from a previous relationship in tow. In a series of posts, Jones said she had married Hussein, and changed her first name to Sakinah. “You Christians all need beheading with a nice blunt knife and stuck on the railings at Raqqa,” she wrote. “Come here I’ll do it for you!”

In the last few weeks, Hussein himself emerged in an optimistic attempt to entice Ferguson demonstrators to pledge allegiance to Isis’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. “We hear you,” he said in an online post, “and we will help you if you accept Islam and reject corrupt man-made laws like democracy and pledge your allegiance to Caliph Abu Bakr and then we will shed our blood for you and send our soldiers that don’t sleep, whose drink is blood, and their play is carnage.”