Assault points to Birmingham as haven for radicals
Some say the stigma is unfair, but the city has a reputation for Islamist militant links
Outside the Maasha’Allah internet cafe, Mohammed Hussain raised his voice over the recorded Koranic verses blaring from the abaya shop two doors down. He was furious Britain’s latest terrorist attacker had amplified his city’s stigma.
“Why do all the jihadis come to Birmingham?” he half-shouted, prompting a passing group of teenage girls in bright coloured headscarves to frown, then giggle.
Exaggeration or not, many people are asking that question. Khalid Masood, 52, the Briton responsible for the deadly attack outside London’s parliament last week, remains a puzzle to investigators working on how, why and when he was radicalised.
But one aspect is familiar: He had a connection to Birmingham, having moved almost a year ago to this city of 1.1 million, where more than one in five residents declare Islam as their religion.
Members of Birmingham’s Muslim communities acknowledged the linkage between their city and Islamist extremism, which many attribute to poverty and drug abuse that make youths vulnerable to jihadi recruiters who operate like gangs. But, Muslims in Birmingham also deeply resent what they see as a grossly unfair reputation, countering that most residents are proud and law-abiding.
Many also see their neighbourhoods as reassuring refuges from the backlash of anti-Islam bigotry roiling Europe and elsewhere. The bigotry has often focused on Birmingham. A few years ago, a Fox News terrorism commentator had to apologise for describing Birmingham as a “Muslimonly city” where non-Muslims “don’t go”.
Nonetheless, Birmingham, Britain’s second-biggest city, has produced a disproportionate number of convicted Islamist militants, including some linked to the Sept 11 attacks, and to last year’s bombings in Brussels.
So many Islamist militants have either been born in Birmingham — or have passed through — that the Birmingham Mail newspaper once lamented that the city had the dubious distinction of “Terror Central”.
“The extremist schools of thought seem to have become more embedded in Birmingham than in other parts of the country,” said Nazir Afzal, the former chief crown prosecutor for northwest England, who is from Birmingham.
Masood, who converted to Islam in his late 30s, was born and raised in an affluent village in southeast England. He spent much of his adulthood in and around London, interrupted by jail time and two year-long relocations to Saudi Arabia. But Birmingham was his last residence.
Birmingham was the birthplace of Britain’s first suicide bomber, the residence of a financier of 9/11 and the place where al-Qaeda hatched a plot to blow up a commercial airliner in 2006. When a masked member of al-Shebab, the Somali extremist group, celebrated the murder of soldier Lee Rigby in a 2013 video, he listed Birmingham as the first source of its fighters.
The man who is believed to have recruited the militant known as Jihadi John, the Islamic State executioner with the Queen’s English accent, was from Birmingham, as was his closest associate. Other prominent militants who have come through the city’s underground networks include Abdelhamid Abaaoud, organiser of the 2015 Paris attacks, and Mohamed Abrini, a Belgian national who helped plot the 2016 Brussels attacks.
In 2014, Birmingham was at the centre of a so-called “Trojan Horse” plot in which, it was alleged, a group of Islamist extremists had sought to infiltrate and take over two dozen state schools. A recent report by the Henry Jackson Society, a politically conservative research organisation, found that one in 10 convicted Islamist militants in Britain come from five Birmingham neighbourhoods.
David Videcette, a former senior counterterrorism official, said that Birmingham had a better established extremist network than London — a city of 7 million — which helped to explain why, in his view, many investigations lead “back to Birmingham”.
Part of Birmingham’s allure to prospective militants is its diverse sprawl of Muslim neighbourhoods where they can blend in easily, local activists said.
“It’s a hiding place or a passing place to do what they want to do, and keep a low profile,” said Mohammed Ashfaq, director of Kikit, a community organisation that helps young people who are drawn to drugs and extremist ideology.
Birmingham is also much poorer than London, providing a more exploitable population for extremists, Mr Ashfaq said, recalling how his organisation dissuaded two youngsters from joining the IS. Both were drug addicts. “A lot of kids are on drugs, or from single parent families, or who experience domestic violence,” Mr Ashfaq said.
There are recently arrived Somalis, third-generation Bangladeshis and European converts, like Alicia Fierens, who moved here with her Chinese husband, also a convert, six years ago because Belgium had become too anti-Muslim, she said.
“We were having our first child and we didn’t want him to grow up with that,” she said. Birmingham is friendlier, “as long as you stay in the area”.
One problem, said Nicola Benyahia, who runs Families for Life, an independent organisation that helps parents detect radicalisation in their children, is the mistrust between Muslim communities and the authorities. “It doesn’t help when the community feels on the defensive,” she said.
Residents were angered and appalled when the government in 2008 secretly placed hundreds of close-circuit television cameras in predominantly Muslim neighbourhoods. “It didn’t feel like it was for our security,” Ms Benyahia said.
But she readily acknowledged that recruiters prey on Muslim youths. Her son Rasheed, then 19, abruptly left for Syria in May 2015 and was killed six months later, which prompted her to start her charity to help other parents avoid the same fate.
Ms Benyahia, a Welsh convert married to an Algerian, said she believed someone in Birmingham had radicalised her son. When her daughter once asked him, Ms Benyahia said, he recoiled and responded: “Don’t ruin it for anyone else.”
Birmingham’s Green Lane Mosque once had a reputation as an “incubator” of militants, Khalid Mahmood, a local lawmaker, said. Now the mosque seeks to counter them. Last week the mosque quickly condemned the attack in Westminster, saying it would “only strengthen our ongoing work in exposing deviant extremist ideologies, to ensure that we safeguard vulnerable individuals susceptible to radicalisation”.
Mr Videcette said extremist networks are run “like the mafia” and include bookshops that sell extremist literature. They also organise tours and talks involving hate preachers, he said, and use some mosques to raise funds. “It’s a business for them,” he said. “When we say terrorism, people tend to think it’s about religion. It’s not. This is always about money.”