THE BREEDING GROUND
Like Belgium’s Molenbeek, these streets are a jihadi breeding ground
THE tightly packed terraced streets around Salman Abedi’s home have produced a string of jihadists willing to die for their twisted cause.
At least 17 extremists now dead in Syria or Iraq, or behind bars, have emerged from the Manchester communities of Fallowfield and Moss Side – once notorious for gang turf wars.
As detectives work to establish whether Abedi was part of a network of jihadists in the city, parallels are being drawn with the Brussels suburb of Molenbeek.
It was there that four of the gang who brought terror to Paris in November 2015, including mastermind Abdelhamid Abaaoud, grew up and plotted atrocities.
Like Moss Side, Molenbeek is an area where impressionable unemployed young men are easy prey for hate preachers recruiting for Isis.
And questions are now being asked – as they were in Belgium – about whether security services have been keeping close enough surveillance in the area.
The most notable Isis jihadist to have emerged from Moss Side was Ronald Fiddler, also known as Jamal al-Harith.
A Muslim convert, he carried out a suicide attack at a military base near the besieged Iraqi city of Mosul earlier this year.
Before joining Isis, al-Harith had spent two years detained in Guantanamo Bay as a suspected enemy combatant, having been captured in Pakistan.
Another jihadist who grew up in the area was Isis recruiter Raphael Hostey, 24, a friend of Abedi.
Security sources last night revealed how Abedi’s contacts with Hostey meant he was put on an intelligence watchlist in 2015.
The pair are understood to have messaged several times on the AskFM website, as well as Twitter, before Hostey was killed last May by a drone strike in Syria.
Hostey was linked to al-Harith through a Moss Side gym they both attended.
After quitting Liverpool John Moores University, graphic design student Hostey reportedly lured other western Isis recruits to Syria with the prospect of quick marriages to “beautiful wives”.
Hostey travelled to Syria with fellow students Khalil Raoufi and Mohammed Javeed, both 20.
Raoufi, also known as Abu Layth, was killed in combat in February 2014, while Javeed blew himself up in a suicide attack in Iraq later that year.
Hostey and al-Harith’s Manchester associates also included teenage “terror twins” Salma and Zahra Halane.
The former straight A students, now 19, whose family lived in adjoining Chorlton, became jihadi brides in Syria.
They then tried to recruit their whole family to join them through social media. Whether they are still alive is uncertain.
Meanwhile the girls’ elder brother Halane, 27, is believed to be living in Denmark after being banned from the UK.
Halane was a pupil of Burnage Academy for Boys, which Abedi also attended between 2009 and 2011.
Another Moss Side Islamic convert, former RAF Iraq war veteran Stephen Gray, was jailed for five years after twice attempting to join jihadis in Syria.
Gray, who used the name Mustafa, admitted preparing acts of terrorism.
His friend Abdalraouf Abdallah – a British Libyan like Abedi – was left paralysed after taking part in the 2011 Libyan uprising.
He was tried alongside Gray and jailed for five-and-a-half years for trying to help his friend cross from Turkey into Syria.
Three other known Islamist terrorists, Abadallah’s brother Mohammed and his friends Nezar Khalifa and Ray Matimba, were radicalised in the same parts of south Manchester.
A number of them were known to
frequent the Jame’ah Masjid E Noor mosque in Stretford, 15 minutes’ drive from Moss Side.
What police are now trying to establish is how much support Abedi has had within Manchester’s close Libyan community.
A group of Gaddafi dissidents, who were members of the outlawed Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, lived within close proximity to the bomber in Whalley Range.
Among them was Abd al-Baset Azzouz, a father of four from Manchester who left Britain to run a terrorist network in Libya overseen by Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s successor as leader of al-Qaeda.
The most high-profile Libyan jihadist with links to Manchester before now was al-Qaeda lieutenant Anas al-Libi.
He won political asylum in Britain in 1995 after being thrown out of al-Qaeda’s then headquarters in Sudan by Bin Laden. The FBI, who wanted to question him over US embassy bombings in Africa, then learned he was hiding out in north-west England.
His home was raided but police decided there was not enough evidence to link him to the attack in Kenya.
Only later did officials retrieve a 180-page terrorists’ handbook which was dubbed the “Manchester Manual”.
By then, al-Libi had fled, only to be arrested years later in Tripoli. He died in 2015 while awaiting trial in the US for the embassy attacks.
More than 20 years apart, both Abedi and al-Libi seem to have been able to evade the full might of the authorities in Manchester.