Jihadis Felt A 'Moral Duty' To Fight In Syria

Ex-Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Begg has told Sky News that two Birmingham men jailed for terrorism offences told him they felt a “moral duty” to go to Syria for “benign reasons”.

Mr Begg spent time with Yusuf Zubair Sarwar and Mohammed Nahin Ahmed, both 22, in Belmarsh prison earlier this year before his release without charge in October.

He describes them behind bars as being “very young” and “quite bewildered by their situation, especially Yusuf.”

Sarwar and Ahmed pleaded guilty in July to one count each of engaging in conduct in preparation of terrorism acts contrary to Section 5 of the Terrorism Act.

The pair spent eight months in Syria last year after contacting Islamist extremists from the UK.

Mr Begg , who is now Outreach Director for advocacy group CAGE , said that the young men “might have felt it was a bit of an adventure” and “never thought for one moment that what they were doing was a crime against the United Kingdom”.

When Sarwar and Ahmed, childhood friends from Handsworth in Birmingham, returned to the UK in January they were arrested and put in Belmarsh prison.

Mr Begg said: “That would put them alongside, or in the same category as, people who have killed police officers, or gangland murderers, and it’s that level that they were at.”

“The reason why they went to Syria, like most of the young kids, was a time when they saw the Assad regime carrying out brutal policies of using chemical weapons, and using bombs against the civilian population.

“So they thought it was a moral duty, an Islamic duty, to go and help. They came back, crucially, because of the infighting because of the rise of IS, because they didn’t want to be involved.”

Mr Begg said he believes that the British government stance towards Syria returnees is too “black and white”:

“These people could have been an asset … they could have spoken to other people and said that ‘we returned because of the infighting, we saw what was happening with IS, we didn’t want a part of it.

“‘Whatever the utopian dream people have  of what’s happening over there, here’s the reality.’ That voice has now been totally closed down.”

Mr Begg also believes, from his conversations with the young men, that neither were radicalised in Syria but “what may radicalise them is going to be the experience of what Britain did to them when they came back”.

He also criticised government anti-extremism programmes such as Channel and particularly Prevent which he describes as “counter productive and alienating”.

“It makes the assumption that you’re a threat when you’re not,” he said.

“These are the things I think that are patronising to the community and also begin from the premise that if you’re a Muslim that must have been what caused your radicalisation in the first place.”

Jihadis Felt A 'Moral Duty' To Fight In Syria