JIHAD’S INNER LAIR IN BRITAIN:DAVID SANDERSON AND SEAN O’NEILL
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SPARKHILL is, in many ways, typical of inner-city, 21st-century Britain in the age of austerity. The swimming pool is closed, money-transfer bureaux jostle with pawn shops in Stratford Road and the fast-food cartons tumbling in the gutters suggest street cleaning has been hit by cuts.
But scratch the surface in this corner of Birmingham and you find somewhere quite different from the rest of modern Britain. Life here is lived by the rules and allegiances of the rural Kashmiri community where most local families have their origins.
Dig a little deeper and you will also find a deep well of Islamist extremism and a widespread acceptance of jihad.
In 2000, a year before September 11, an al-Qa’ida bomb factory and a stockpile of HMTD explosive was discovered here. Moinul Abedin, the would-be bomber, was jailed for 20 years.
Eight years later, five men were jailed for a plot to kidnap and behead a British soldier home on leave from Afghanistan. Yesterday three ringleaders of a suicide bomb plot were convicted.
Scores of young men from these streets have travelled abroad for jihad and hundreds of thousands of pounds have been raised to finance Mujaheddin groups. The Maktabah bookshop was not just a gathering place for local radicals but a place known internationally for publishing and distributing jihadi propaganda.
The guilty verdicts on three local men are an example of the continued militancy in the area, but also an indication that des- pite spending hundreds of millions of pounds, the government’s Prevent strategy – designed to steer the young away from extremism and improve community links with the police – has made few inroads.
Veterans of Britain’s battles against terrorism liken Sparkhill, and parts of East London, to the Falls Road, the Republican heartland of West Belfast. The community may not support the hardliners in their midst, but neither do they trust the authorities.
When Irfan Naseer, the leader of the terrorist group, sent four young men for training in Pakistan’s tribal areas, he met angry opposition in Sparkhill.
One man, identified in court proceedings only as Jimmy, confronted Naseer and warned him that the four “travellers” must be brought back. A relative of one of the men sent off to Pakistan told Naseer that “he would get a bullet in his head” if anything happened to the man.
The four were sent back from the training camps within 48 hours. But at no point did anyone tell the authorities they were concerned about jihad.
A businessman, Rafiq Khan, said he understood the community’s silence. He said: “Why would people tell police about suspicions? They would fall under suspicion themselves.”
Usama Hasan, of the anti-extremism think tank Quilliam, said the Muslim community in Birmingham “almost live in their own world”.
“Quite often when things like this go on they don’t report them outside the community,” he said. “The police are often seen as outsiders and the state as the enemy.”
A former police anti-terror officer said the silence spoke volumes: “Prevent has been in place for seven years now and has cost hundreds of millions of pounds but, in my experience, it has not produced a single piece of intelligence that helped us intercept a live plot.”
Ian Ward, deputy leader of Birmingham council, said: “Prevent is a long-term strategy, not a quick fix. We need to continue building it to rebuild confidence.”
THE TIMES
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