Jihadis in the ’Hood
The poor East End suburb where two of the London Bridge attackers lived is a hotbed of radical Islamists and white nationalists
THE ELIZABETH FRY apartments look like any other public housing complex in suburban London. The drab gray buildings overlook a quiet tree-lined street, where residents carry groceries or walk their children home from school.
Yet these flats in Barking, a blue-collar neighborhood in London’s East End, were home to a dangerous member of an Islamist death cult: Khuram Shazad Butt. The 27-year-old British national of Pakistani descent led the three-man jihadi cell that killed eight people in the June 3 ramming and knife attacks at London Bridge and Borough Market. Police shot Butt and his two accomplices dead outside a pub, and a day later, the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) took responsibility for the assault.
We still don’t know how the men planned the attack, but we do know they shared a desire to kill and maim innocent people in the name of their warped version of Islam. We also know that two of them, Butt and Rachid Redouane, a 30-yearold Moroccan-libyan, came from Barking—a suburb of 76,000 people that has come under intense focus in the aftermath of the attacks. (The third attacker, Youssef Zaghba, a 22-yearold Moroccan-italian, worked in the area.)
While previous assaults in France and Belgium have cast a spotlight on Muslim ghettos—such as Molenbeek in Brussels or L’ariane outside of Nice, France—barking is a diverse neighborhood. Walk along its main street and you’re hit with the smell of fried chicken and Middle Eastern kebabs. Turn a corner and you might pass a halal butcher or a Lithuanian supermarket. Muslim women in niqabs, Islamic full-face veils, walk alongside women in West Ham United Football Club jackets.
Barking is “a mixture of cultures,” says private security guard Raza Sheikh, 32, a neighbor of Butt’s who is “furious” that the London Bridge attack may have been plotted on his street. “You can find any community here. English, Asian, Eastern European, African.”
The neighborhood wasn’t always this way. Barking has undergone one of the most rapid ethnic transformations in London’s recent history—or, as the British press calls it, “white flight.” Census data from 2001 show that 80 percent of Barking and nearby suburb Dagenham identified as white British; a decade later, this figure had dropped to 49 percent.
The departure of traditionally white workingclass “East Enders” has made the neighborhood a flash point for two kinds of violent extremism: farright white nationalism and radical Islamism. The far-right British National Party and variations of radical Islamist preacher Anjem Choudary’s nowbanned Salafist network Al-muhajiroun—of
which Butt was a known supporter—have jostled for influence on the fringes here. Both have held marches in town, and the core supporters of Choudary— who is serving five years in prison for supporting Isis—reside in the area.
Security services say his network is responsible for the radicalization of hundreds of British Muslims, creating a flock of foreign fighters and inspiring several plots on British soil. The machete-wielding killers of British soldier Lee Rigby, murdered in 2013, had links to Choudary’s gaggle of jihadis. Two years later, a British court imprisoned 18-year-old Kazi Islam, a Muhajiroun supporter, for grooming a teenager with Asperger’s syndrome, whom he met in Barking, and goading him to hack a British soldier to death with a knife.
Part of what makes this area such a fertile recruitment ground for radicals is its poverty. In London, the middle class has gentrified once blighted areas such as Hackney and Dalston. But there are few hipsters in Barking. The neighborhood is just 5 miles from the gleaming skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, one of London’s financial centers, yet Barking has the highest level of unemployment in London. Along Barking’s main street, shuttered stores daubed with graffiti sit alongside gambling parlors. Men drink beer out of open containers or collect social security checks from the job center, while the homeless panhandle outside barber shops and
WOMEN AT HIS MOSQUE, HE SAYS, HAVE BEEN SPIT ON AS THEY WALKED DOWN THE STREET.
liquor stores. Joblessness doesn’t drive young people to extremism, but experts have long said those who feel hopeless are some of the most vulnerable to radicalization.
Just ask Ash Siddique. He’s the secretary of the gated Al-madina Mosque—barking’s largest, with a thousand worshippers every day and triple that for Friday prayers. The mosque offers counseling services to disenfranchised Muslims, and Siddique says his staff keeps a close eye on anyone who seems prone to violence or hatred. Siddique and his team run karate classes, welcome the homeless in every month and suggest mentors who try to help individuals heading down the wrong path.
Not everyone appreciates his message of tolerance and peace: Several radical Muslims—he calls them “bad guys”—have left his mosque and never returned. But Siddique, who says a congregation of 1,000 prayed at the mosque immediately after the London Bridge attack for those killed, acknowledges there is a problem that moderate Muslims in London are not tackling: young men and women who feel they do not belong.
“I feel some Muslim communities have failed,” he says. British Muslims, he notes, need to acknowledge that there are those among them who suffer the same “ills” as other sections of society: drugs, sex outside of marriage and crime. “We judge those youngsters and push them to the boundaries. Who are they going to go to? You have a vulnerable individual whose life isn’t going anywhere, who is then groomed by someone who knows what they need—an arm put round them. They are going to walk to the other end of the earth for [the recruiter].”
Was Butt one of these lost young men? Neighbors described him as normal and sociable. He had a wife and two children. He went to local barbecues, watched his beloved Arsenal Football Club and trained at the Ummah Fitness Center, a first-floor gym near Siddique’s mosque. Outside of odd jobs at KFC and London’s subway network, he played football with teenage boys and attended male-only swimming sessions with fellow Muslims. But he also posed with the Islamist black-and-white Shahada flag in London’s Regent’s Park in 2015 with his fellow Muhajiroun-linked extremists. A year later, he appeared in a documentary about radical Islamists in London, The Jihadis Next Door, appearing with a man who traveled to Syria to join ISIS.
The failure to snare this East End jihadi, Siddique says, rests with British intelligence, regarded as among the best in the world. It’s unclear if police were aware of his appearance in the documentary before the London Bridge attack. But at least two people say they notified authorities of Butt’s increasingly extremist views long before the attack: once in 2015 for attempting to indoctrinate children, another time for accessing online propaganda. “People did their job. They told the authorities,” he says. “Years later, he kills innocents, and people ask the question, ‘What is the Muslim community doing about it?’”
In Butt’s case, as he became more extreme, Muslims who knew him seemingly tried to stop him. He was kicked out of two East End mosques for his views: the East London mosque and Barking’s Jabir bin Zayd Islamic Centre, after he repeatedly interrupted its imam by shouting “Only God is in charge,” according to Salaudeen Jailabdeen, who lived near the jihadi.
Even Butt’s adoption of the name Abu Zaitun was a clear sign of his more radical beliefs. Abu translates as “father of ” in Arabic and is taken on by many jihadis as a nom de guerre, including the world’s most notorious—isis leader Abu
Bakr al-baghdadi. “If you are using the name Abu in a place like Barking,” Siddique says, “then you know there’s a problem.”
Barking’s problems aren’t confined to its radical Muslims. Like roughly half the country, people in the area voted to leave the European Union in last June’s Brexit referendum. Despite having two opposition lawmakers from the center-left Labour Party, many locals view Barking as an area of strong support for the U.K. Independence Party, a Euroskeptic, anti-immigration movement. UKIP made the town a key target for Britain’s general election on June 8, playing on growing fears of unemployment and immigration, among other things.
Siddique says some of this far-right support has spilled over into attacks on Muslims. Women at his mosque, he says, have been spit on as they walked down the street. In 2013, two white women repeatedly punched a Somali woman wearing a hijab, describing her as a “Muslim terrorist.” Hate crimes against Muslims nearly tripled in Barking between 2014 and 2015, from eight to 21, according to London police figures. Since the Paris attacks in November 2015, many Muslims have been reluctant to report crimes to the police, believing they would be ignored, Siddique says.
Despite these incidents, Siddique is optimistic about what’s happening in the area. “We should live in a cesspit,” he says, referring to white nationalists and Islamist extremists in the area. “But the reality is… we live in a borough where actually [most people] are really tolerant of each other.”
Other residents agree. Mary Phillips, a local housewife and mother, says that the issue of radical Islamists in Barking is limited to “idiots” and that if Barking has changed in any way, it’s for the better. She says her six children “love” the area, and “that’s all that matters” to her. Alan Harris, a 70-year-old retiree, says, “It’s changed a lot, but I haven’t felt any tensions here.”
And there are many people working to help would-be radicals avoid extremism. At the TKO Boxing Gym, Johnny Eames runs free boxing classes for the community out of a sports complex that also hosts a food bank. Its green glass door is cracked, and the equipment is rickety. But the gym can show a diverse group of young people “a different way,” says Eames, who works for free alongside four other volunteer staffers. “You’ll find that the aggression is channeled in the right direction,” he says. “I’ve got Albanians, Afghanis, Chinese, Jamaicans, Africans, Irish travelers, Romani [people]. Probably the only true Englishman in here is myself.”
While Eames makes his fighters “leave religion at the door,” there are signs that anti-muslim prejudice remains a powerful force in Barking. John, a laborer who declined to give his last name, points to his apartment block. “I’m the only one who speaks English up there. They’re all on the dole, and the kids are tearaways,” he says, referring to families who receive social security payments.
Tommy, a retiree who also declined to give his last name, laments the boarding up of the town’s bars, which have dwindled from 15 to just four in recent years. “They had to close because of the [immigrant] community,” he says over a lunchtime drink at the local pub. “It used to be a lovely town, but now there’s too many foreigners.”
He apologizes if his answer sounds racist, adding that lots of members of Barking’s minorities are “lovely people.” But as he takes a draw on his cigarette, looking out onto the area’s main street, he becomes emotional. He says he fears for the future of his children and his grandchildren. He worries about the extremist threat, about his town changing. And there is nothing, he says, that’s left for him to love about the place where he’s lived for more than 30 years.
This pessimism may spread, and in the aftermath of the London Bridge attack, so too may the divisions between whites and Muslims— not just in Barking but in all of London. For a city with the first Muslim mayor of a Western capital, and one that has long celebrated its diversity, that could be the worst possible outcome—and exactly what ISIS wants.
“IF YOU ARE USING THE NAME ABU IN A PLACE LIKE BARKING,” SIDDIQUE SAYS, “THEN YOU KNOW THERE’S A PROBLEM.”