Ex-Guantanamo Briton says Isil is used as ‘stick to beat Muslims’

MOAZZAM BEGG, director of the controversial advocacy group Cage, has encouraged people to go to Syria and “defend the revolution” against President Assad, and accused the Government of using Isil as “a stick to beat” Muslims with.

The former Guantanamo Bay detainee, who was released in 2005, also described two British men who were imprisoned for 13 years after travelling to Syria to join an al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group as “really good brothers”.

The Telegraph has revealed the danger posed by returning jihadis, disclosing that a third of Islamist terrorists convicted of plotting atrocities on British soil were able to slip into the UK after training or fighting abroad.

Keith Vaz MP, chair of the Home Affairs select committee, said the figures were “extremely concerning”. He also warned that we need to stop people leaving in the first place because once they have been radicalised “it is very difficult to turn them around”.

Yet Begg openly praised Mohammed Nahin Ahmed and Yusuf Zubair Sarwar, two young men from Birmingham who returned to the UK with traces of explosives on their clothes, after travel- ling to Syria to fight with an al-Qaeda linked group.

Speaking at an event held at South London Islamic Centre earlier this year, he described his encounter with Ahmed and Sarwar in Belmarsh maximum security prison. “I met them when I was in prison last year. And these two individuals were from the city of Birmingham. They are really nice brothers, very simple,” he said.

Begg suggested Western governments were to blame for Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil)-sponsored terrorist attacks against civilians, saying that “they have to be responsible for the crimes they’ve committed”. A recording of the event, obtained by

The Telegraph, reveals that Begg condemned Isil as “evil” but said the Government exaggerates its threat, using it “as a stick to beat us [Muslims] with”.

Rupert Sutton, of the Henry Jackson Society, a counter-extremism think tank, said Begg’s views could leave people “vulnerable to radicalisation”.

“These comments are yet more evidence of Begg’s divisive and inflammatory rhetoric, which seeks to frighten Muslim communities into believing the government is targeting their religion, and risks driving an ‘us and them’ mentality which leaves people vulnerable to radicalisation.”

‘These comments are yet more evidence of Moazzam Begg’s divisive and inflammatory rhetoric’