ISIS recruiter who radicalised London Bridge attackers was protected by MI5
From collusion to blowback
http://www.911forum.org.uk/board/viewtopic.php?p=175504#175504
https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/isis-recruiter-who-radicalised-london-bridge-attackers-was-protected-by-mi5-232998ab6421
by Nafeez Ahmed
Britain’s top ISIS recruiter, Anjem Choudary,
protesting with al-Muhajiroun supporters outside
the Syrian embassy in London. Source: Asian World
Published by INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a crowdfunded
investigative journalism project for people and
planet. Support us to keep digging where others fear to tread.
The terrorists who rampaged across London on the
night of 3 June were part of a wider extremist
network closely monitored by MI5 for decades. The
same network was heavily involved in recruiting
Britons to fight with jihadist groups in Syria, Iraq and Libya.
Police have confirmed that Khuram Shazad Butt,
Rachid Redouane and Youssef Zaghba were the three
terrorists shot dead after participating in a
brutal van and knife attack in the London Bridge area.
According to press reports, both Butt and
Redouane were longstanding members of the
proscribed extremist network formerly known as
al-Muhajiroun. After 9/11, the group operated
under different names such as Shariah4UK,
Muslims4Crusades and Islam4UK. Originally founded
by Lebanese firebrand, Omar Bakri Mohammed, who
was banned from returning to the UK after the 7/7
attacks, the network was later run by Bakri’s deputy, Anjem Choudary.
Red flags, missed
Choudary was convicted in 2016 for supporting and encouraging support for ISIS.
Yet the press has largely ignored the extent to
which Choudary’s uncanny freedom to operate in
Britain, and to send British Muslims to fight in
foreign theatres, was linked to his opaque
relationship to Britain’s security services.
Khuram Butt was known to counter-terrorism police
and MI5, who investigated him in 2015. The
official line is that he was deprioritised as no
evidence of attack planning was found.
Anonymous British counter-terrorism sources,
however, told CNN that Butt was the subject of a
“full package” of investigatory measures, as he
was believed to be “one of the most dangerous
extremists in the UK”. After September 2014, when
ISIS began calling for attacks on the West,
British security services grew “increasingly
concerned that al-Muhajiroun members who had
remained in the UK would carry out terrorist
attacks.” The sources said that “One of those
they were most concerned about was Butt.”
According to the Telegraph, Redouane fought with
the Libyan Islamist militia unit Liwa al-Ummah to
topple Muammar Qaddafi. Libyan security and
diplomatic sources told the paper this militia
sent foreign fighters to Syria after the
NATO-backed revolution, many of whom “went on to
fight alongside Al-Qaeda extremists in Syria”.
As British foreign policy analyst Mark Curtis
reports: “The Liwa al-Ummah was formed by a
deputy of Abdul Hakim Belhaj, the former emir of
the al Qaeda-linked Libyan Islamic Fighting
Group.” Belhaj went on to become a military
commander for the NATO-backed National Transition
Council in Tripoli to bring down Qadafi in 2011.
And in 2012, Liwa al-Ummah fighters in Syria
merged with the main rebel force, the Free Syrian
Army (FSA)?—?which received direct military and
logistical support from the US and UK militaries,
as well as the Gulf states and Turkey.
Metropolitan Police denied that the third
attacker, Zaghba, was known to the authorities,
describing him as “not a police or MI5 subject of interest.”
An Italian national of Moroccan descent, Zaghba
had also come on the radar of Italian
intelligence in March 2016. Authorities stopped
him at Bologna airport while trying to take a
flight to Turkey to reach Syria, and had passed
information on his movements to Moroccan
authorities, as well as MI5 and MI6?—?noting that
he had told authorities in Bologna that he wanted to become a terrorist.
Despite being placed on an EU-wide watchlist, he
managed to enter Britain without problems.
ISIS recruiters
Several sources who spoke to me on condition of
anonymity said they had known of both Butt and
Redouane, describing them as notorious
“trouble-makers” who were shunned by wider Muslim communities.
“Yeah, I knew these guys, they used to hang out
down the road from me in Barking,” said one
Muslim resident of east London. “They were known
as open ISIS supporters. They used to recruit
people to go Syria and fight. It was hardly a secret.”
The source was familiar with Khuram Butt but did
not know the other London attackers. “He was part
of the al-Muhajiroun network. They were Anjem
Choudary’s boys. When the Syrian war first broke
out, these guys were organising a lot of people
to go there and fight. They did it under
humanitarian cover, pretending they were going to give aid and stuff.”
Another source based in north London knew both
Butt and Redouane as followers of Anjem Choudary.
He said that they had joined al Muhajiroun after
9/11, and whenever he would bump into them they
would talk “all about fighting infidel shia, they worse than Jews, etc.”
He said that they openly campaigned in support of
ISIS: “Man, these guys were loud and clear. They
thought of Iraq and Syria as land of the
caliphate. As before they loved Taliban but
criticised them for not making it caliphate. They
always invited people to join jihad and Syria. Nothing new there.”
MI5’s open door
According to an investigation by Middle East Eye,
from 2011 to around early-2013, MI5 operated an
‘open door’ policy for Britons to travel and
fight in Libya and Syria. Foreign fighters told
MEE that their travels had been facilitated by Britain’s security services.
After travelling back to Libya in May 2011, one
British fighter “was approached by two
counter-terrorism police officers in the
departure lounge who told him that if he was
going to fight he would be committing a crime.”
The fighter provided them the name and phone
number of an MI5 officer. Following a quick phone
call to him, he was waved through.
“As he waited to board the plane, he said the
same MI5 officer called him to tell him that he had ‘sorted it out’…
Another British citizen with experience of
fighting in both Libya and in Syria with rebel
groups also told MEE that he had been able to
travel to and from the UK without disruption.
‘No questions were asked,’ he said.”
The ‘open door’ policy was designed to augment US
and British support to opposition forces seeking
to overthrow Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad in
Syria. Funnelled through our allies, the Gulf
states and Turkey, the bulk of this support went
not to secular rebels but to hardline Islamist
groups, including both al-Qaeda and ISIS.
Under this ‘open door’, as Curtis observes, “at
least one London attacker and the Manchester
bomber were able to travel to Libya to fight in Britain’s war.”
Since 2011, the primary figure responsible for
recruiting Britons to fight in the Middle East
and North Africa was Anjem Choudary.
Of the 850 Britons who went to join various
insurgent groups in Syria, Iraq and Libya, most
of them?—?fully 500?—?had been recruited by
Choudary to fight with ISIS. Choudary had also
been linked to as many as 15 terror plots since
2001. These astonishing figures were revealed by
the police after Choudary was convicted last year.
Sensitive ISIS documents corroborate the former
al-Muhajiroun network’s crucial role in this
British-ISIS terror funnel. The documents, leaked
in early 2016, identified Choudary’s
mentor?—?Omar Bakri Mohammed?—?as a sponsor of
Britons trying to be inducted into ISIS.
Choudary’s role as a key instigator in the
recruitment of British Muslims to join the ISIS
jihad in Syria, occurred at precisely the same
time that Britain’s security services were
operating an ‘open door’ policy to augment the
anti-Gaddafi and anti-Assad rebellions.
These activities were well-known to British
police and intelligence. Earlier this year, a
group of extremists connected to Choudary were
jailed for supporting ISIS and urging people to
fight in Syria, after a 20 month-long undercover police operation.
This raises the question as to whether the reason
nothing was done to shut down Choudary’s
activities was his utility to MI5’s ‘open door’ to Libya and Syria.
MI5 and ISIS recruiters, sitting in a tree
The official explanation of the failure to
prosecute Bakri and Choudary for so long despite
this track record is that the two were
notoriously clever at appearing to staying on the
right side of law. Supposedly, this meant that
counter-terrorism officials found it difficult to build a case against them.
This narrative is problematic. Security sources
speaking outside of official press statements
have pointed to a somewhat different reality:
that both Bakri and Choudary had ties to MI5.
In his book The Way of the World, Pulitzer Prize
winning reporter Ron Suskind recounts how he was
told by a senior MI5 officer that Bakri had long
been an informant for the security service, who
“had helped MI5 on several of its investigations.”
Bakri confirmed the same in an interview with
Suskind. “Bakri enjoyed his notoriety and was
willing to pay for it with information he passed to the police,” wrote Suskind.
“It’s a fabric of subtle interlocking needs: the
[British authorities] need be in a backchannel
conversation with someone working the steam valve
of Muslim anger; Bakri needs health insurance.”
Bakri’s ties with British intelligence to support
foreign operations, moreover, go back decades.
As I wrote in the Independent on Sunday:
“According to a former US Army intelligence
officer, John Loftus, three senior al-Muhajiroun
figures?—?Mr Bakri Mohammed, Abu Hamza and Haroon
Rashid Aswat?—?were recruited by MI6 in 1996 to
influence Islamist activities in the Balkans.”
But the connection did not stop there.
In 2000, Bakri admitted training British Muslims
to fight as jihadists abroad, boasting: “The
British government knows who we are. MI5 has
interrogated us many times. I think now we have
something called public immunity.”
A year later, the private security firm set up by
Bakri in cohorts with Abu Hamza?—?Sakina Security
Services?—?was raided by police and eventually
shut down. Speaking in Parliament at the time,
Andrew Dismore MP claimed the firm sent Britons
“overseas for jihad training with live arms and
ammunition”. Bakri was not arrested, let alone charged or prosecuted.
In short, Omar Bakri’s utility to British state
operations in foreign theatres, such as the
Balkans, appeared to grant him immunity in extremist recruitment at home.
To this day, it is not widely known that Bakri
and his al-Muhajiroun network played a key role
in facilitating the recruitment, radicalisation
and logistics behind the 7/7 London bombings. The
ultimate suppression of crucial evidence of this
from government narratives, despite being
mandatory reading for all legal counsel during
the 7/7 Coroner’s Inquest, has granted the group virtual free reign.
Thus, Omar Bakri’s acolyte and deputy, Anjem
Choudary, led a similarly charmed life.
Days after Choudary’s terrorism conviction, Will
Geddes?—?a former Scotland Yard counter-terrorism
officer who had investigated Choudary?—?revealed
that prior to the proceedings, Choudary too had been protected by MI5.
The Telegraph reported that despite being at “the
forefront of radical Islam in Britain” for 20 years:
“The security services repeatedly prevented
Scotland Yard from pursuing criminal
investigations against hate preacher Anjem
Choudary… Met counter-terror officers often felt
they had enough evidence to build a case against
the radicalising cleric, only to be told to hang
fire by MI5, because he was crucial to one of their on-going investigations.”
It was only in August 2015, after Choudary posted
YouTube videos online which openly documented his
support for ISIS, that he was eventually
prosecuted. Prior to that, the police believed
they had a watertight case, but the decision not
to prosecute had come from MI5.
Geddes himself told the newspaper:
“I am gobsmacked that we allowed him to carry on
as long as long as he did. He was up to his neck
in it but the police can’t do full investigations
on people if the security service say they are
working on a really big job, because they have
the priority. That is what they did constantly.
While the police might have had lots of evidence
they were pulled back by the security service
because he [Choudary] was one of the people they
were monitoring. It was very frustrating and did
cause some tension but we were told we had to consider the bigger picture.”
The bigger picture: war
Geddes did not respond to a request for comment
asking whether the bigger picture might include
Britain’s foreign policy goals in Syria.
According to Charles Shoebridge, though?—?a
former British Army and Metropolitan Police
counter-terrorism intelligence officer?—?“nothing
was done by UK authorities” to stop UK citizens
“joining jihadist groups in Libya and Syria.”
This was despite the fact that these Britons
“made no secret on social media of the fact, even
sometimes posting evidence of their participation
in acts of terrorism and war crimes.” There was
an “obvious risk of terrorism blowback were such
trained and experienced extremists to return to Britain.”
Shoebridge had pointed out at the time that “this
‘turning a blind eye’ was actually consistent
with the UK govt position of intensive overt and
covert support of rebel groups in Libya and Syria
in attempting to topple Gaddafi and Assad.”
Turning a blind eye, he added, was also
consistent with “a long record of the UK
government allowing, using and facilitating
Islamist extremists to destabilise ‘enemy’
states, from Soviet occupied Afghanistan in the
80s, through Bosnia and Chechnya, to Libya and Syria today…
“It was only in 2013 when groups such as ISIS
started to harm US and UK interests in Syria and
Iraq, and kill US and UK citizens, that any
action at all was taken to stop British jihadists
from travelling, or arresting and charging those
who returned. At this time it’s likely a tipping
point was reached in the inherent conflict
between MI6 priorities in furthering UK govt
policy to overthrow Gaddafi and Assad, and MI5’s
stated priority of keeping the UK safe from
terrorism?—?indeed, it’s likely a tipping point
was also reached internally within MI5 itself. In
any event, from 2013 action started to be taken,
which suggests government policy changed.”
The official defence for all this is that before
2013, the legislation necessary to tackle
travelling jihadists did not exist. Shoebridge
dismisses this as nonsense: “First, it’s been
illegal to take part in terrorist related
activities abroad since 2006 and, second, the new
legislation introduced since 2013 has itself barely been used.”
In fact, it was only around 2014 that British
counter-terrorism officials moved more aggressively to take down al-Muhajiroun.
I asked the Home Office to confirm whether
Choudary was indeed an MI5 informant, and whether
British authorities were aware of his recruitment
of Britons to Syria?—?including the role of any
of the London attackers as ‘foreign fighters’.
A spokesperson said: “We are not commenting on
the individuals named while that investigation
continues or responding to speculation.”
But if Geddes and Shoebridge are correct, then
when Anjem Choudary?—?Britain’s top ISIS terror
recruiter?—?was dispatching Britons to Syria, he
was, in Geddes words, “allowed… to carry on” by Britain’s security services.
The decision not to prosecute Choudary was to
have fatal consequences. In February, about half
of the British fighters who had travelled to Iraq, Syria and Libya returned.
In November 2014, as Home Secretary, Theresa May
said that JTAC, the Joint Terrorism Analysis
Centre, had raised the threat level for
international terrorism from ‘substantial’ to
‘severe’, indicating that an attack on the UK was
believed to be “highly likely.” May’s
announcement clarified that the threat level was
lifted primarily due to the threat from 500
British nationals who had largely fought with ISIS:
“The decision to change the threat level was
based primarily on developments in Syria and
Iraq, where the terrorist group ISIL controls
swathes of territory. We believe more than 500
British nationals have travelled to Syria and
Iraq, many of them to fight… ISIL and its western
fighters now represent one of the most serious terrorist threats we face.”
Collusion
It was Theresa May’s own ‘open door’ policy
toward Britons fighting in foreign theatres which
directly facilitated the expansion of this threat.
Under that policy, the chief coordinator of the
British-ISIS corridor, Choudary, had active ties
to MI5 which prevented counter-terrorism police officers from prosecuting him.
This draws a direct connection between Choudary’s
impunity in Britain until 2015, and Britain’s
short-sighted foreign policy goals in Syria.
“When the US and British militaries were working
with the Turks to train various Syrian rebel
groups, many military officers knew that among
those we were training was the next round of
jihadists,” said Alastair Crooke, a former 30
year senior MI6 officer who dealt with Islamist
groups across the Muslim world. “But the CIA was
fixated on regime change. We knew that even if at
any moment ISIS was eventually defeated, these
Islamist groups would move against secular and moderate forces.”
This collusion between Western security services
and Islamist extremism, Crooke told me, has very
long roots in an intelligence culture that went
back as far as the 1920s, “when in the attempt to
gather control of the Arabian peninsula, King
Abdulaziz told us that the key is Wahabism.”
This alliance culminated in the war in
Afghanistan in the 1980s, which was “the first
clear use of fired-up Islamist radicals to
provoke Russia into an invasion. This set the
scene ever since. From then, our intelligence
services have had a deeply entwined history with
Islamist groups based on the belief that Saudi
Arabia had the power to turn them on and off at will.”
Islamist groups have been used by British and
American intelligence services, said Crooke,
essentially “to control and contain the Middle
East” against different forces, Nasserism,
nationalists, and more recently Baathists.
Perhaps Crooke’s most damning insight was how
these operations led to British intelligence
becoming heavily dependent on Gulf state
intelligence services to conduct regional operations.
“In the 1980s, Saudi began paying for operations
with large sums of money?—?which was considered
acceptable in the interests of landing a blow on
the USSR’s influence in the region. As a result,
though, our intelligence services became
increasingly dependent on Saudi funding. If they
wanted to avoid Congressional or parliamentary
oversight, and to continue expanding difficult
and sensitive off-the-books operations, they
would go instead to their Gulf partners.”
The impact of this on the integrity of the US and
British intelligence community has been devastating:
“The assumption is that this doesn’t affect the
integrity of intelligence, but clearly it does.
The Gulf states have become paymasters for
increasing expenditures on intelligence
operations that the security services would prefer not be disclosed.”
This “incipient influence directly into the
intelligence services”, said Crooke, is
“supplemented by huge subsidies to think-tanks in
Washington and London which create a specific
cultural atmosphere. It has led many in the US
and Europe to uncritically absorb the Gulf
kingdoms’ narrative of the region?—?one in which
it is seen as absolutely fine to use fired-up
Sunni Islamism to overturn governments like that
of Gaddafi or Assad, without any sort of reflection.”
For Crooke, this mindset is responsible for the
persistence of such failed policies, and explains
why in the early days of the ‘Arab Spring’,
Western policymakers believed they could “use
Islamists of all sorts as useful tools to bring
about change, and that our Gulf allies could control all this.”
I asked Crooke what should be done?—?especially
now, in the unprecedented wake of three terrorist
attacks in Britain over three months:
“We should start by surfacing these matters into
consciousness. Only then can we begin the
conversations needed to resolve them. We need to
understand that the tension between fighting a
‘war on terror’ while at the same time in some
ways being in bed with terrorists, has produced a disaster.”
For Shoebridge, the biggest elephant in the room
is intelligence reform: “Repeatedly, MI5 has made
decisions not to deploy its substantial physical
and electronic surveillance resources against
extremists who were well known to it, and who
then went on to commit or attempt terrorist
attacks?—?Manchester being a prime example.”
One explanation of this, he said, could be that
the decision making processes by which MI5
prioritises the deployment of its resources are
“defective.” Another could be that some
extremists “were actually working as informants
for MI5, regarded as under control or
trustworthy, and therefore not needing to be watched.”
How can we really ever know?
“Only a fully empowered and totally independent
inquiry could establish the truth of the matter
however?—?and there’s no sign that this is likely
to happen anytime soon.”This is how to end
Islamic State terror - and stop British foreign policy blowback
Theresa May is right. Enough is enough. A
difficult and embarrassing conversation needs to be had about the fact that…
www.middleeasteye.net
...
Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is an award-winning 16-year
investigative journalist and creator of INSURGE
intelligence, a crowdfunded public interest
investigative journalism project. He is ‘System
Shift’ columnist at VICE’s Motherboard.
His work has been published in The Guardian,
VICE, Independent on Sunday, The Independent, The
Scotsman, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Foreign
Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, New York Observer,
The New Statesman, Prospect, Le Monde
diplomatique, Raw Story, New Internationalist,
Huffington Post UK, Al-Arabiya English, AlterNet,
The Ecologist, and Asia Times, among other places.
Nafeez’s work on the root causes and covert
operations linked to international terrorism
officially contributed to the 9/11 Commission and the 7/7 Coroner’s Inquest.
Nafeez has twice been featured in the Evening
Standard’s ‘Top 1,000’ list of most influential
people in London, in 2014 and 2015.
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Please consider seriously the reason why these elite institutions are not discussed in the mainstream press despite the immense financial and political power they wield?
There are sick and evil occultists running the Western World. They are power mad lunatics like something from a kids cartoon with their fingers on the nuclear button! Armageddon is closer than you thought. Only God can save our souls from their clutches, at least that's my considered opinion - Tony
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