‘Terry Taliban’ blows himself up on Mosul suicide mission
London jihadi attended rally with Lee Rigby killer
A WHITE Muslim convert who became one of Britain’s most infamous jihadis has blown himself up in a suicide attack near the Iraqi city of Mosul, the Islamic State terror group announced yesterday.
Khalid Kelly, 49, who was nicknamed ‘Terry Taliban’, killed himself by driving an armoured truck laden with explosives at Iraqi militia near a town called Tal Afar, 50 miles south-west of Mosul, on Friday night.
IS said Dublin-born Kelly, who used the nom de guerre Abu Osama Al-Irlandi, was one of five bombers
‘He named his eldest son Osama’
who blew themselves up in and near Mosul this weekend, as part of the terror group’s desperate attempts to defend the city against Iraqi and Kurdish forces. Islamic State has turned to suicide attacks after local forces, backed by US and RAF air strikes, laid siege to Mosul last month and began tightening the noose.
IS released a picture of bearded Kelly, armed with a Kalashnikov assault rifle and wearing a long, dark robe and a baseball cap, accompanying news of his ‘martyrdom’.
He was photographed in front of an armoured vehicle, which may have been the one he drove to his death. IS published separate pic- tures of the moment Kelly apparently blows his vehicle up.
Kelly has been one of the most notorious jihadis in Britain and Ireland for the past 15 years.
Born Terence Kelly, the former Catholic altar boy trained as a midwife and intensive care unit nurse. He went to work in the Saudi capital of Riyadh in 1996, but in 2000 he was arrested in the ultra-conservative Islamic country for making alcohol at his home and selling it.
He was sent to prison for eight months, where he converted to Islam. After serving his sentence, Kelly assumed the name Khalid, and moved to London, where he became friends with extremist cleric Omar Bakri and his lieutenant Anjem Choudary. Bakri has been banned from re-entering Britain after he went to Lebanon on holiday in 2005, and Choudary, 49, is in prison for supporting IS.
As a leading member of Bakri’s banned group Al-Muhajiroun, Kelly attended extremist rallies across London. He was photographed speaking at one in 2007, standing in front of Michael Adebolajo, who was jailed for 45 years for the beheading of soldier Lee Rigby in 2013. In 2009, Kelly was reported to be living in north-west Pakistan, where he was training with the Taliban, earning him the nickname ‘Terry Taliban’, a slang term used by British soldiers fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan.
He is believed to have married a Pakistani woman and returned to England with her.
The couple had three children, who live with their mother in London, although Kelly went back to Ireland in about 2010.
Kelly was an ardent fan of AlQaeda leader Osama Bin Laden, even naming his eldest son Osama. After 9/11, he said: ‘I believe Allah gives life and takes life. They [the 3,000 who died] would have died wherever they were in the world, it is just a condition of their death.’
He was known for his outrageous and inflammatory comments to the media. In 2011, he threatened to kill Barack Obama ahead of the US President’s visit to Dublin.
Kelly told a newspaper: ‘Personally I would feel happy if Obama was killed. How could I not feel happy when a big enemy of Islam is gone?’ He was arrested but released without charge.
Ahead of travelling to Pakistan to train with the Taliban, Kelly was reported as saying that he could end up killing a British soldier within a week.
This weekend, it was revealed that Kelly was living as a recluse in a village called Ardagh in County Longford, 70 miles west of Dublin. He told neighbours that his name was ‘Adam Deen’ and that he was writing a book.
According to Irish security forces, Kelly is believed to have flown to London to visit his family in March, and then on to Turkey, after which he crossed the border to Iraq.