https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/jihadi-john-documentary-review/
A new documentary raises important questions about the journey of the Kuwait-born British terrorist to ISIS.
On August 19, 2014, a masked man with a London accent appeared on a video, boasting that he was a soldier for ISIS, and proceeded to behead American journalist James Foley. Security services almost immediately identified the murderer as Mohammed Emwazi, a Kuwait-born British man of 26. His captives, noticing the British accents with which he and three other captors spoke, referred to the four as John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Emwazi’s media nickname became “Jihadi John.”
Built around interviews with MI5 and CIA officials, leading soldiers such as General David Richards of the U.K. and General David Petraeus of the U.S., and survivors of Syrian hostage camps from the era, director Anthony Wonke’s penetrating HBO documentary Unmasking Jihadi John: Anatomy of a Terrorist makes unfortunate, distracting use of cheesy dramatic reenactments in telling this awful story. But it also raises important questions about Emwazi’s journey to terrorism. The documentary is tinged with a sense of regret that the spooks could have done more to give Emwazi an exit ramp from evil.
As a boy, Emwazi immigrated to England at age six, his family winning asylum because they had been, in Kuwait, members of a persecuted minority, the Bedoon. Emwazi attended a Church of England school in London and seemed well-adjusted. As an adolescent, he began to disengage, to seem “slightly strange” in the words of one of his teachers. Footage of his youth shows him constantly covering his mouth; apparently the other boys liked to tease him about his breath. As a teen, he took up drinking and marijuana, but in college he started adopting Islamic dress and habits. Such faith “gives structure where there was none,” says one observer interviewed in the doc.
Online jihadist recruitment tools began to catch Emwazi’s eye, and he went to Somalia and Tanzania for indoctrination in Islamism. In the latter country he was locked up, beaten, and questioned. On the way back to London, he was stopped again in Amsterdam and again in Dover. British spies tried to steer him to be a double agent and threatened to make life difficult for him if he didn’t cooperate. “Whether we contributed to his further radicalization . . . by stopping him from travel is an interesting question,” notes Commander Richard Walton, Scotland Yard head of counterterrorism.
