The 25 Britons on Assad’s ‘kill list’ of Isil targets – and 14 are dead already
Syria’s president gave file on Islamist fighters to Tory MPs. Robert Verkaik and Robert Mendick report
DOZENS of Britons are on a “kill list” of hundreds of foreign-born Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) terrorists drawn up by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, it can be revealed today.
A dossier on a computer disc has been obtained by The Sunday Telegraph after he gave it to two Conservative MPs who were invited to visit him in his capital Damascus in the spring.
The list targets 25 Britons that his regime accuses of joining Isil. Fourteen of them are already dead, including two of three named brothers from Brighton who travelled to Syria two years ago and have since been killed by Syrian Army forces.
Eleven more of the jihadists identified are thought to be still alive, among them five women including Khadijah Dare, who is accused by President Assad of being the first Western female fighter to join Isil.
Also on the list is Sally Jones, a Muslim convert who is believed to have taken one of her two children to Syria, plus teenage schoolgirl twins from Manchester.
Two brothers from Cardiff and a group of young men from Portsmouth are named in the dossier, as is “Jihadi John”, the Isil murderer of several Western hostages.
Propaganda DVDs were also handed to David Davis, former shadow home affairs spokesman, and his Tory colleague Adam Holloway. The list is in Arabic but the accompanying videos are narrated in English.
An introduction to the footage says: “This film showcases samples of those criminals who perpetrated the most atrocious crimes against the Syrian people. They are random samples possessed by the Syrian state.”
The regime also accused hate preacher Omar Bakri Mohammed of radicalising young Britons and encouraging them to fight in Syria. He is serving time in jail in Lebanon after being convicted of terror offences there.
Britain has its own register of targets and the disclosure of a Syrian “kill list” will raise speculation that the two countries may even be sharing intelligence on terror suspects, possibly by back channels.
The UK and US have sanctioned drone attacks on British Isil fighters including Mohammed Emwazi, the real identity of Jihadi John, who was killed by an American strike in November.
Reyaad Khan, 21, from Cardiff, was killed in an “act of self-defence” by an RAF “precision air strike” last September and Junaid Hussain, 21, a computer hacker from Birmingham, also died in a US drone strike.
The Assad list was handed over seemingly to show that Syria’s government is committed to fighting Isil terrorists who have also been threatening the West.
Last night Mr Davis said: “What we got from the [Assad] government was a mixture of propaganda and self-delusion, mixed together with some hard facts. An example of the self-delusion arose whenever we talked about their civil war.
“‘It is not a civil war,’ they insisted, ‘We are being attacked by foreign fighters and enemy states’.” Mr Davis added: “Up to a point. The only jihadist group that is led and dominated by foreign fighters is Islamic State. The others may in part be acting as proxies for Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey but they are predominantly Syrian.
“But to recognise that is to recognise that those Syrians had a grievance against the state, which the Syrian state refuses to do.”
When he pressed regime officials on allegations of murder and torture by Syrian security services, “they insisted that they had mechanisms in place to deal with this – but they could not tell me why there had not been a single prosecution.
“The capture, torture and murder of British doctor Abbas Khan proves that they have not yet mended their ways,” said the MP.
Prof Anthony Glees, from the Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies at Buckingham University, said: “The real significance of this list is that it shows how hard Assad is trying to establish the credentials of his government while at the same time adding to David Cameron’s security headache in the region.
“Although these British [terrorist] names are well-known to our own security services, the value of the intelligence will be details of aliases or other information which they might be using to return to the UK and plan terrorist attacks here.
“Assad is seeking to curry favour with the British Government.”
‘What we got from the Assad government was a mixture of propaganda and delusion with some hard facts’