LONDON
— Mohammed Emwazi was 6 when his parents moved to West London from his
birthplace in Kuwait, and he seems to have lived a normal life,
studying hard and graduating in computer sciences from the University of
Westminster in 2009.
But
he came to the attention of the British intelligence services in May
that same year, detained as he landed in Tanzania with two friends on
what he described as a celebratory safari. British officials thought he
and his friends were headed to Somalia, to fight with the terrorist
group Al Shabab, and allegedly tried to recruit him as an informant before shipping him back home.
Mr.
Emwazi was identified on Thursday as the masked Islamic State fighter
called “Jihadi John,” and his journey from computer student to a
murderous spokesman for the Islamic State is only beginning to come
clear. How and when he was radicalized, and whether the British
intelligence services were at fault — either dealing with him too
harshly or not identifying him as a serious threat soon enough — are
already the subject of hot debate.
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The
question for security services is the same all over the West, whether
in Britain, France or now in the United States, as some young Muslims
are becoming radicalized or seeking to join a jihad. Given important
constitutional and legal protections, how do counterterrorism and police
officials draw the line when they find enough evidence to suspect
someone, but do not have enough to prosecute them, or even to keep them
under legal surveillance?
“Doing
nothing is not practical or acceptable under today’s conditions,” said
Shashank Joshi, a senior research fellow at Royal United Services
Institute, a British research institution.
Mr. Emwazi was called “Jihadi John” by the foreign hostages he guarded, a number of whom he apparently beheaded in widely circulated videos. He was first identified on Thursday by The Washington Post website,
and his name was confirmed by a senior British security official. The
official said that the British government had identified Mr. Emwazi some
time ago but had not disclosed his name for operational reasons. The
identification was also confirmed in Washington by a senior United
States military intelligence official.
Information
is still vague about Mr. Emwazi, with Britain officially refusing to
confirm that he is indeed “Jihadi John” because of what are described as
continuing operations.
But Mr. Emwazi appears in 2011 court documents, obtained by the BBC,
as a member of a network of extremists who funneled funds, equipment
and recruits “from the United Kingdom to Somalia to undertake
terrorism-related activity.”
Mr.
Emwazi is alleged to be part of a group from West and North London,
sometimes known as “the North London Boys,” with links to the
Somalia-based terrorist group Al Shabab, organized by an individual, whose name was redacted, who had returned to London in February 2007.
Another
person associated with that group was Bilal al-Berjawi, who was born in
Lebanon but brought to West London as a baby. He fought in Somalia and
rose through the ranks of Al Shabab and Al Qaeda in Africa before being
killed in a drone strike in January 2012, according to Raffaello
Pantucci, also a fellow at the Royal United Services Institute.
Mr.
Berjawi traveled to Kenya in February 2009, telling his family he was
heading for a safari; he and a friend were detained in Nairobi and
shipped back to London, but made it to Somalia in October that year.
The
neighborhood group “is a tight community and it’s very probable that
they knew each other and were part of the same crew,” Mr. Pantucci said.
So
it is likely that Mr. Emwazi’s own safari a few months later in May,
from Britain to Germany to Tanzania, using the name of Muhammad ibn
Muazzam, set off alarms with the British security services, and that he
had started on the road to radicalism even before his encounter with MI5
in 2009.
Asim Qureshi, research director at CAGE, a British advocacy organization
opposed to what it calls the “war on terror,” met with Mr. Emwazi in
the fall of 2009. Mr. Emwazi was very angry over his treatment at the
hands of British security services, Mr. Qureshi said, and the two stayed
in contact for two years.
Mr.
Qureshi said he is not 100 percent sure that Mr. Emwazi, whom he
described as “extremely kind, extremely humble and extremely
soft-spoken,” is the masked Islamic State terrorist.
But
he nonetheless blamed Mr. Emwazi’s treatment for his radicalization,
describing harassment by police officers at airports, pressure on Kuwait
to cancel a visa and on one occasion, Mr. Emwazi being “roughed up” and
“strangled by a police officer” before being sent home.
“This
is not somebody who ever said, ‘I hate the system, I reject the
system,’ ” Mr. Qureshi said. “It’s someone who said, ‘I don’t like the
environment but I’ll work within the system to effect change.’ ”
As
ever, there are conflicting interpretations, with some seeing a young
Muslim man treated badly, put into a headlock, barred from traveling and
induced to betray his friends, and those who say that such treatment is
not any excuse, or reason, for repeatedly cutting off the heads of
civilians taken hostage.
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A visual guide to the crisis in Iraq and Syria.
Further,
there are others who are wondering how security services can identify
potential terrorists like Mr. Emwazi, but then fail to recognize what
risk they pose.
The CAGE group, which embraces its notoriety, emphasized similar circumstances in the case of Michael Adebolajo, who attacked and hacked to death a British soldier, Lee Rigby, outside a London barracks in May 2013.
Mr.
Adebolajo claimed he had been detained in Kenya and tortured by British
officials who suspected he was traveling to Somalia to join Al Shabab,
and MI5 also tried to turn him into an informer.
Mr.
Emwazi, returning from Tanzania, was detained again at an airport in
the Netherlands and questioned by Dutch and British security officials.
Mr.
Emwazi later moved to Kuwait, his birthplace, working for a computer
company, and he returned to London at least twice, Mr. Qureshi said.
British counterterrorism officials detained Mr. Emwazi in June 2010,
fingerprinting him and searching his belongings. In July of that year,
Mr. Qureshi said, Mr. Emwazi was not allowed to return to Kuwait, which
had apparently refused to renew his visa, and Mr. Emwazi blamed the
British government.
“I
had a job waiting for me and marriage to get started,” he wrote in a
2010 email to Mr. Qureshi.
“But now I feel like a prisoner, only not in a
cage, in London.”
In
his statement, Mr. Qureshi said of Mr. Emwazi, “He desperately wanted
to use the system to change his situation, but the system ultimately
rejected him.”
Mr.
Qureshi said he had last heard from Mr. Emwazi in January 2012. By
2013, he was in Idlib, Syria, helping to guard Western hostages and in
August 2014, presided over the first of the beheading videos of those
hostages.
Even
if Mr. Emwazi’s version of events, as passed on by Mr. Qureshi, is
true, Mr. Pantucci asked, “Is it justifiable to go and behead
journalists and aid workers because you have cops causing you trouble?”
Mr.
Joshi said there were doubts about CAGE’s “crude and simplistic”
narrative of radicalization because of police mistreatment, saying that
there was evidence of Mr. Emwazi’s involvement with Somalia before he
was ever detained, and long before the Syrian civil war and the rise of
Islamic State.
J. M. Berger, a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington and co-author of a new book on the history of ISIS, also said that the narrative of police harassment, while it may have contributed to his radicalization, does not explain it.
“Malcolm
X and Martin Luther King got a lot more pressure from police, and
neither decided that decapitating people is the right response,” he
said.
There were similar law enforcement issues in the case of three young men in Brooklyn
who became fascinated with Islamic State. There are benefits to waiting
and watching rather than rushing to disrupt a plot the moment it is
detected, said Diego G. Rodriguez, chief of the F.B.I.’s New York
division.
“We’re always trying to identify these folks, their hierarchy, their network,” he said.
“There
are no rules as to how long cases should cook, no recipe,” said Andrew
M. Liepman, a former deputy director at the National Counterterrorism
Center who is now a senior policy analyst at the RAND Corporation. “Lots
of factors must be weighed.”
Suspects
in Western countries must break the law or have provided sufficient
evidence to be taken into custody, he said, adding, “Both we and the
British have struggled with this.”
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