Young football fans who turned into Isil killers
GROWING up in west London in the Nineties, Alexanda Kotey and El Shafee Elsheikh had many things in common, not least their passion for Queens Park Rangers, their local football team.
As teenagers, they both dreamt of playing at nearby Loftus Road. But less than a decade later, it was not their love of football that brought them to world attention, but the unfathomable evil of their actions as two members of “The Beatles”, the most reviled and feared of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’s murder squads.
Late last month as the final remnants of the caliphate were being pursued by Kurdish forces, the pair, who had once been proud poster boys for Isil, were caught, cowering among refugees, as they tried to sneak out of Syria.
Initially refusing to speak, their identities were only discovered when suspicious local soldiers and the CIA carried out fingerprint tests.
Last night, their families were still at a loss to understand how these two ordinary young men had ended up potentially facing the death penalty for unspeakable crimes.
Rashid, Elsheikh’s father, who brought his family to Britain in order to flee civil war in his native Sudan, expressed his complete devastation. Mahmoud, Elsheikh’s younger brother, also travelled to the Middle East to fight for Isil and was killed in 2015. Rashid told The Daily Telegraph: “This is not the right time for us to speak. This is a mother who lost two of her sons. Her son is now in the hands of people whom we don’t know. We don’t know what they are doing [with him]. We’ve lost two kids.”
In Syria, the pair and Mohammed Emwazi and Aine Davis, their fellow west Londoners, became known as “The Beatles” because of their British accents.
Responsible for the murders of at least 23 people, including British, American and Japanese hostages, and members of the Syrian Army, the group came to encapsulate the sheer merciless depravity of the Isil ideology.
While Emwazi was killed in 2015 by a US drone strike and Davis is in prison in Turkey, the capture of Kotey and Elsheikh will offer Britain and the US the opportunity to get information about other foreign Isil fighters.
Kotey’s journey from the streets of Notting Hill to the killing fields of Syria began in 2009 when he travelled to the Gaza strip on an aid convoy led by George Galloway, the former MP.
Also on the trip, it emerged later, were Reza Afsharzadegan, Munir Farooqi and Amin Addala, the Islamic extremists and a violent gang who had been dubbed The London Boys.
A friend who was also part of the aid convoy later said Kotey had “changed forever” during the trip, and it is thought he never returned to the UK.
The son of a Ghanaian father and a Greek-cypriot mother, Kotey was described as an easy-going if sometimes mischievous teenager. His family worked in the dress cutting industry and Kotey and Pablo, his older brother, were well liked by their neighbours.
Joyce O’connell, 78, who knew the family well, said: “I used to see them regularly when they were both teenagers, playing football together out the back, or hanging outside their mum’s flat having a crafty smoke.
“They appeared to be well broughtup young men. I’d often see them in suits. Their mother Christine was always very nice, a lovely woman.”
The change appeared to come when Kotey was in his early 20s and he fell in love with a Muslim woman. After he converted, taking the name Abu Salih, the pair married and went on to have two daughters. Kotey reportedly began worshipping at the Al Manaar mosque, where the other members of “The Beatles” would also go to pray.
It is not clear if the gang got to know each other in London or Syria.
In 2009, Kotey left his family and joined the aid convoy. It is thought he then made his way to Syria or Iraq, where he underwent training with jihadist cells before ending up in a senior role with the burgeoning Isil forces.
His willingness to torture and murder for the cause meant he climbed the ranks, and when he joined forces with the other “Beatles”, their propaganda benefits were quickly seized upon by Isil’s leaders. It is thought Kotey became known as “Ringo” by his captives, and he gained a reputation as being the most cruel. Daniel Rye, the Danish hostage who was released in June 2014, described how Kotey kicked him 25 times in his ribs to mark his 25th birthday. Kotey was even thought to be instrumental in directing many of the group’s murders, which were filmed and disseminated on social media.
Elsheikh was a later convert to the cause, but had an equally unremarkable upbringing in west London.
Born in Sudan, he came to Britain with his parents and two brothers in the early Nineties, settling in Shepherd’s Bush. Known as Shaf, he spent three years in the Army Cadet Force. After leaving school, he worked as a mechanic at a fairground and was never in trouble with the police.
But things appear to have gone awry in 2009, when his older brother, Khalid, whom he adored, was charged with being involved in a gang murder. Craig Brown, 20, a local drug dealer, was shot dead on his doorstep on Christmas Eve, in revenge for a fight he had months earlier with Khalid.
Elsheikh’s brother was acquitted of the murder, but was convicted of possessing a firearm and jailed for 10 years.
Around the same time, his parents split up and Elsheikh reportedly fell under the influence of a group of older boys. It is not clear whether this included any of his future Isil comrades.
Elsheikh became more interested in his faith and when he was 21 married a Canadian Muslim woman. But he became frustrated when she was unable to join him in London and it was around that time his mother noticed a change.
In an interview published two years ago in The Washington Post, Maha Elgizouli, his mother, described how she had caught him watching a video in which a preacher was insisting that martyrdom was essential for “true believers”. She said she had told him:
‘This is a mother who lost two of her sons. Her son is now in the hands of people we don’t know’
She said she had told him: “Shafee, you want to go and be a dead Muslim?” to which he had answered: “No mummy”.
She said she had argued with him incessantly over their different interpretations of their religion, but it was clear he was becoming increasingly radical.
He was also beginning to exert influence over Mahmoud. His mother said at the time: “My kids were perfect, and one day it suddenly happened.”
In February 2012, Elsheikh, who spoke good Arabic, told a community leader in west London that he wanted to go to Syria. Mahmoud later travelled to Iraq and in 2015 was killed fighting near Tikrit. Elsheikh ended up in Aleppo with a Syrian wife and daughter and his Canadian wife and son.
Kotey and Elsheikh were caught close to the Syria Turkey border last month and despite the cowardly nature of their attempted escape, it was feared they might have been attempting to return to the UK to carry out or command a terrorist attack.