Young Medics Were Lured by Briton to Join ISIS

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/18/world/europe/young-medics-were-lured-by-briton-to-join-isis.html

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LONDON — Among the growing number of unlikely Britons leaving for Syria to join the Islamic State have been schoolgirls, mothers and, in March and June this year, two groups of medical students and young doctors recruited by a former medical student from northeastern England, the BBC reported on Friday.

The recruiter, Mohammed Fakhri al-Khabass, a Briton from Middlesbrough of Palestinian descent, “played a major role” in persuading at least 16 men and women to head for Syria this year, his university in Sudan told the BBC in an investigative report.

Like Mr. Fakhri, the recruits had been sent to study medicine in Sudan by middle-class parents in Britain, who reportedly wanted their children to stay in touch with Islam and the Arab world.

Mr. Fakhri started medical school at the University of Medical Sciences and Technology in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, in 2008. Three years later, he became president of the university’s Islamic Cultural Association, where he discouraged other students from pursuing careers in the West and showed them footage of bombing victims in Syria, the BBC reported.

Mr. Fakhri’s present whereabouts is not clear. One of his brothers said he was in Sudan, but the dean of his university told the BBC that he was in Syria. The dean, Ahmed Babiker Mohamed Zein, said in the BBC report that Mr. Fakhri had “played a major role in recruiting the students who left to Turkey.”

Nine of the 16 recruits traveled from Sudan to Turkey in March and then crossed into Syria. The others followed in June, though two were arrested in Turkey and later sent back to Britain.

One of the March recruits, Ahmed Sami Kheder from London, who traveled to Syria with his younger sister, appeared in an Islamic State propaganda video in May. The video, described by the BBC report, is strikingly different from the scenes of beheadings or triumphalist parades of jihadists. Instead of guns and black flags, there are babies in incubators and an M.R.I. scanner.

Shown sitting behind a desk with a stethoscope around his neck, Mr. Kheder makes an appeal to other medical students to help build a new society: “There is a really good medical service being provided here,” he is quoted as saying, citing “pediatric hospitals with specialized doctors.”

European governments have been grappling with how to thwart thousands of their citizens from traveling to Iraq and Syria to fight with the Islamic State. But the governments are also confronting a new problem: Some of those disaffected citizens are plotting attacks at home.

In Paris, the prosecutor’s office announced on Friday that it had opened a formal investigation into three men accused of plotting an attack at a naval base after viewing Islamic State videos on the web and contacting a fighter in Syria.

All three had initially planned to go to Syria, but later came up with the idea of staging an attack in France, according to a statement by the prosecutor’s office.

The police foiled the alleged plot on Monday, picking up four men and later releasing one. The others were placed in preliminary detention to await trial after having confessed to plotting the attack, the authorities said.