The 7/7 widow and a boom in British jihad

How did a young woman from Aylesbury end up as a terrorist suspect in Somalia?

Samantha Lewthwaite, who was married to 7/7 bomber Jermaine Lindsay: reports claim she is “no small fish” in terrorist circles - The 7/7 widow and a boom in British jihad
Samantha Lewthwaite, who was married to 7/7 bomber Jermaine Lindsay: reports claim she is “no small fish” in terrorist circles

We cannot say we weren’t warned. On September 16 2010, Jonathan Evans, the head of MI5, addressed an audience of security professionals in London. A “significant number of UK residents”, he said, were training with the Somali Islamists, al-Shabaab. “It’s only a matter of time before we see terrorism on our streets inspired by those who are today fighting alongside al-Shabaab.”

Before that threat is fully realised, the people of East Africa are having to deal with vacationing British Islamists. MI5 say that around 60 British jihadis are fighting or training in Somalia, their costs defrayed by sympathisers in Britain.

Until they have the resources to target the infidels back home, these extremists are causing mayhem in Somalia and neighbouring Kenya. Jermaine Grant, lately of Newham, east London, has gone on trial in Mombasa, after police found ammunition and bomb-making chemicals – ammonium nitrate, acetone and lead nitrate – in his flat in a seedy suburb of the city. It is highly likely, as Kenyan police suspect, that his targets were Western tourists. Except there aren’t many tourists since al-Shabaab kidnapped and killed the 66-year-old French tetraplegic Marie Dedieu in the exotic resort of Lamu in October last year, then killed a British man and abducted his wife. Five months on, Judith Tebbutt from Aylesbury is still missing.

This week we learnt that Kenyan police hunting al-Shabaab terrorists are desperately seeking Samantha Lewthwaite, a 28-year-old from Buckinghamshire. Ms Lewthwaite, who converted to Islam when she was 15, is the widow of the 7/7 King’s Cross bomber, Jermaine Lindsay. According to Kenyan police sources, Lewthwaite and her friend Habib Ghani, of Hounslow, are connected to Jermaine Grant. Ghani, who calls himself “Osama”, is said to be carrying more than 500 bomb fuses and bundles of US dollars.

Following the London atrocities in July 2005, Lewthwaite claimed to find her late husband’s actions “abhorrent”. It seems strange, then, that she is allegedly using (three) false passports and associating with a terrorist suspect, in a region that is currently regarded as the most dangerous front in the fight against international terrorism. Reports claim she is “no small fish” in terrorist circles, describing her role as a “financier”.

As far as the armed Islamists are concerned, British or American recruits have many advantages – one of which is that they are largely self-financing. For example, earlier this year, Shabaaz Hussein, 28, was convicted at Woolwich Crown Court of sending £10,000 to three Anglo-Somali terrorists. His family home in Stepney was awash with al-Qaeda and al-Shabaab materials. More advantages come with the fact that Anglo-Somali jihadis are generally relatively well-educated, able to drive and are familiar with IT; they also use the world’s lingua franca.

Should al-Shabaab wish to extend its activities beyond revenge attacks on Burundi, Kenya or Uganda (which all have troops operating in Somalia), these British recruits would be well-placed to carry them out. As African forces put the squeeze on al-Shabaab, it may well make compensatory trouble elsewhere. A week ago it made formal homage to the global al-Qaeda franchise and was publicly welcomed by terror chief Ayman al-Zawahiri – a grouping that could escalate into operations further afield, as we saw with Anglo-Pakistanis who went to Afghanistan.

This merger of terror sects happened in the same week that Somali delegates came to London, with much accompanying fanfare. Nearly two years after Mr Evans’s warning, the Coalition government hosted an international conference on Somalia. It was a Blairite exercise in nation-building, stage-managed by his understudies. The gist was that it is better and cheaper to tackle such problems as maritime piracy and terrorism at source, rather than having to cope with such consequences as car bombs during the London Olympics.

As usual, where there was talk of “breaking the cycle of instability” in “the world’s most dysfunctional state”, our money was pledged: £20 million for markets, hospitals and schools in Somalia, plus £51 million more for the hundreds of thousands of Somali refugees languishing in Ethiopia and Kenya, driven out by their homeland’s bitter civil war. To add an air of resolution, there has been parallel talk from Whitehall generals about targeting pirate and terrorist encampments and their respective “kingpins” with air strikes.

One such strike occurred in January near Mogadishu. Two US rockets hit a vehicle convoy in which Bilal al-Barjawi, a 27-year-old British citizen of Lebanese descent, was travelling. The strike took place minutes after he was stupidly brazen enough to use his mobile phone to congratulate his wife on giving birth in a London hospital. A close associate of the al-Qaeda leader who planned the 1998 East African US embassy bombings, al-Barjawi was vaporised, as one of his vehicles was laden with high explosives.

However, the British authorities’ focus on the so-called Somali “fount” conveniently deflects attention from the domestic manifestations of this problem. Those pockets of the country where extremism ferments have been almost entirely caused by the lax immigration measures of successive British governments. No one has officially said that Britain has the most dysfunctional immigration laws in the Western world, but that is a very widely held view among those who live here. If we have a problem with radicalised Somalis then it surely resides here as much as in Somalia.

Although Britain has only passing historical involvement with Somalia, we seem to have a remarkably large number of Somalis living in this country. Estimates of their number in Britain range from 350,000 to an extraordinary 1 million. These figures are educated guesses, since the last census in 1991 counted only 43,532 Somalis. This cannot be true, as anyone who has walked along Ealing’s “Mogadishu Mile” or around Poplar, Tower Hamlets, Woolwich and parts of west London can tell you.

Some rationalise the Somalis’ failure to respond to census requests by pointing to their inherent suspicion of all authority. According to such Somali community leaders as the lawyer Omer Ahmed, refusal to be counted leads to Somalis missing out on “social provision” – though not apparently public housing, for Somalis lead the way, with 80 per cent living in council tenancies, the highest occupancy rate for any alien group. Some 65 per cent of Somali males are estimated to be unemployed and presumably on benefits.

Ahmed is rightly incredulous that the British government does not know how many Somalis live here, though he is knowledgeable about the stereotyping and discrimination they face. Many young Somalis have adopted their elders’ habit of chewing the Benzedrine-like leaf qat, or have drifted into the mongrelised gangs that infest poorer parts of the capital and other cities such as Liverpool and Sheffield.

Last week’s London conference on Somalia prompted the al-Shabaab spokesman Sheikh Ali Dhere to warn: “Your peace depends upon us being left alone. If you do not let us live in peace, you will not live in peace.” You can read similar threats on the al-Shabaab Twitter feed, under the name HSM Press – the acronym of Harakat Al-Shabaab Al-Mujahideen, which requires no translation. Al-Shabaab’s use of Twitter is slightly odd, when you consider that they have banned the teaching and use of English, as well as the internet and television.

The language of the HSM posts is colloquial, the argot of Woolwich rather than Mogadishu: “Cameron and his incompetent 'headbangers’ ought to think twice about the consequences of an endless war in Somalia. Somalia carried death.”

As another British government vainly punches above its weight to set a cruel world to rights, it signally fails to enforce immigration controls at home, without foreseeing the fatal consequences of its incompetence.

We may not have much of an export industry nowadays, but in one area we are world leaders: exporting dysfunctional, resentful young men – and, it seems, women – who are all too skilled in bringing murder and mayhem to friendly countries like Kenya or Uganda.

That’s what we really need an international conference about. It demands some very frank exchanges, in which the British do the listening, rather than talking the leaden international conflict-resolving blather of civil servants and politicians.