Richard Spencer
Richard Spencer is one of the Daily Telegraph's Middle East correspondents. Married with three children, he was previously news editor, and then China correspondent for six years. He is based in Cairo.
Are we seeing the end of five-star jihad? Two recent videos posted by jihadis in Syria hint at a change of mood among the young British men who have travelled to Syria to take up arms for the militant cause.
One, which appeared on YouTube last night, expresses it very openly. It follows the same format as other jihadi social media efforts: a young man wearing a balaclava, speaking estuary English with a slight foreign twang and posing with a gun in front of an pickup truck in the desert addresses the camera. The black flag of militant Islam flies above him.
"This is fitna, this is trials, this is tribulations," he says. "It is not easy to stand in front of a tank while it launches at you." Fighting for real is more difficult than people think. "It's not as easy as pulling out your nine-millimetre on a back road on the streets of London and blasting a guy with it (knowing) that he's not going to blast you back," he says, giving an unexpected insight into his personal background. "It's not as easy as putting your feet up on the couch after a hard day's work on the corner. The status of a mujahid is heavy. When you come to these lands, you act the Islam, you are the Islam that people want to see and know. So you don't just come here and put on a tactical vest and grab a Kalashnikov and get a big beard and that's it. Brothers, please … it's a career it's life, it's not just something you put on Facebook. Don't think you are coming to a road that is planted with roses and pebbles and as people have seen recently villas and mansions and things like that."
Ah yes, roses, villas and mansions. Our man seems to be referring to popular social media descriptions of the unexpectedly pampered life awaiting those coming to Syria that many British jihadis have posted in their online forums. My colleague Ruth Sherlock, reporting on the phenomenon last November, wrote of the ready availability of chocolate and Red Bull, and how girls could be provided for a religiously approved marriage:
One widely circulated tweet read: “A brother who was in Mali couldn’t change clothes or shower for 2 months, subhanllah here it truly is a 5 star Jihad, may allah reward him." In response to a question on his Tumblr account about whether Syria really is “the best place on earth” as the jihadists are making out, Abu Qa’qaa’ replies: ’Honestly every single word i say is the truth. look at the beauty of this … this morning i was sat in front of a fire place with an actual fire and cups of tea subhaan allah :)’.
When it comes to his "mansions", our man is specifically referring to a couple of famous videos showing jihadis splashing around in the swimming pools of rather fancy villas they seem to have occupied. And this is a bit of a giveaway. For while, on the face of it, you could read this message as just a worthy corrective to those attracted only by worldly enticements – "it's not all fun and games, you know", the warning is also reflective of a simple truth – the life of luxury-with-the-odd-battle-thrown-in may well have ended, as a result of the fightback against the most radical jihadist group, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (Isis), by other rebels.
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The villa with the swimming pool here (there were others) was subsequently identified by a Lebanese newspaper as being in the town of Hreitan, just north of Aleppo. The man in the pool is Omar al-Shishani, the Georgian-born, half-ethnic Chechen leader of Isis's foreign fighters' wing and of its operations in Aleppo province. (His troops are the conflict's most notorious beheaders – something that might also be quite difficult for the gentler suburban jihadis to get used to.)
Unfortunately for him, he and his men were driven out of Hreitan and the neighbouring town of Anadan last Friday, presumably having to abandon their pleasant accommodation. Shishani and his men are now said to be under siege in the rather grimmer smuggler town of Aazaz on the Turkish border, an hour's drive to the north. Others have fled east, to the harsh desert sands of Raqqa and Deir al-Zour provinces on the Iraqi border, a long way from Aleppo's green landscapes, fresh food and prosperous merchant dwellings.
Despite the British jihadis' well-publicised love of pizza and Kit-Kat, well-provided for apparently, it is probably too harsh to say they were only in it for the home comforts, welcome though they might be. As the man in the first video suggests, more troubling is likely to be the actual experience of combat, for which nothing can fully prepare you. With the recent civil war within a civil war – "fitna", in the Arabic he also uses – the aspect of personal disillusionment must be even worse: you come to fight for Allah, and find that the people you are actually killing are fellow Sunni Muslims, whatever ISIS's ideologues say about them being apostates. Now, as their hosts turn on them, there is a visible upset on English-speaking jihadi Twitter. One went so far as objecting to Syrians complaining about foreign jihadis coming to hijack their revolution on the grounds that he was being subject to "nationalist abuse". It is hard to come to a country to rescue its people from tyranny only to find the locals rising up against your presence – as more regular British interventions have shown in the region.
This disillusionment may lie behind reports at the weekend of a large-scale return home by British jihadis – 250 is one figure given, up from a previous estimate of 50 a few weeks ago. I have no independent verification of those figures but a journalist colleague passing through Gaziantep airport in south-east Turkey, itself less than an hour's drive from Aazaz, reported seeing a larger than usual number of apparent jihadis (recognisable by their beards in much more secular Turkey) passing through in the wrong direction after the rebels' war on Isis began.
Maybe I am reading too much into an individual's mannerisms, but I also sensed a fraction of this unease in the second recent video I mentioned – that showing Abdul Waheed Majeed, the 41-year-old from Crawley who joined another jihadi outfit, Jabhat Al-Nusra, and who blew himself up in a suicide truck while trying to force a way into the regime-held Aleppo prison earlier this month. That attack itself might serve as a warning to those wanting to join the fight – it is a shambles from start to finish, the suicide truck seems to explode prematurely before reaching its target, and after a lot of toing and froing, unable to find a way to press the assault, the attackers are about to get in their cars and flee when their leader is struck dead by a fluke mortar round.
As for Mr Majeed, well, he is clearly uncomfortable with what he is about to do. He talks about his tongue being tied, but it's clearly more than that – he shuffles about with his hands in his pockets, stutters and laughs nervously. He looks as if he would rather be somewhere else, was the thought that struck me most forcefully. Perhaps a curry house on Crawley High Street with his wife and kids might have been a better way to spend his weekend after all?
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