Mark Townsend

THE BROTHERS’ Gym was not much to look at. A couple of dumbbells, some old weights and a few frayed mats for doing press ups on. Yet in this modest outbuilding, beside the prayer hall of Brighton’s al-Quds mosque, the largest group of jihadists ever documented in Europe would gather most evenings.

Throughout the summer of 2013, the 30-strong group, mostly skinny white kids in Adidas tracksuits and Nike trainers, could be seen strolling up the city’s Dyke Road towards the gym. The police were among those who watched them.

Undercover officers and police spotters would have wondered why so many white working class troublemakers had suddenly converted to Islam.

Most officers knew them by sight. Some of the new adherents were among the most prolific offenders in Brighton and belonged to the Hill Street Gang, a street outfit that inhabited Brighton’s London Road area down towards the coast at Saltdean.

Yet despite intensive surveillance of the gang, the police had no idea its members were discussing ambitions far away from Brighton’s underworld.

Hill Street Gang members were planning to go to Syria to fight in its brutal civil war.

It would come as a shock to the authorities, posing myriad questions for police and council officials over the events that were about to unfold.

Inside the gym, teenagers from the nearby housing estates, many of whom had left school with no qualifications, studied the geo-global politics of the Syrian war and discussed removing the country’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, to protect the country’s Muslims.

Among the gym’s loyalists were five brothers from the same British-Libyan family. Amer Deghayes, 18, was the oldest and had set up the gym to encourage gang members to renounce criminality and embrace religion. He taught them prayers, the tenets of Islam.

Then there were his 17-yearold twin brothers, Abdullah and Abdul. Together they led HSG.

There was Jaffar, a studious and deferential teenager. The 15-year-old had thrown himself into gym activities, spending days learning the Quran. Mohammed, the youngest sibling at 13, was happy to follow the lead of his older brothers.

In late September 2013, some of the group decided it was time to travel abroad and wage war. They planned to join jihadist group Jabhat al-Nusra who were a few weeks away from becoming the official Syrian branch of al-Qaeda.

Amer and a friend from the al-Quds mosque, Mo Khan, were the first to set off, travelling on a humanitarian convoy through Europe and Turkey into north Syria on October 14.They would never return.

Back in Brighton, others promised to follow. Investigators monitored the gang, but were none the wiser. Jaffar was discussed by the city’s counter-extremism experts but no action was taken. Jihadist messages linked to the group were seemingly ignored.

At the start of 2014, a major Brothers’

RECRUITER: Amer in video trying to persuade Western teens to go to Syria. Inset, twin brothers Abdullah, left, who died in Syria, and Abdul. Below, their brother Jaffar Deghayes, killed in an attack on Idlib city