Syrian President Assad hands Tory MPs a ‘kill list’ of British extremists
Syrian President Bashar Assad has drawn up a “kill list” of people fighting for Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL), including 25 British extremists, it has been claimed.
Conservative MPs, who visited Assad in Damascus this year, were given documents containing the names of Britons fighting for IS in Syria and Iraq - 14 of whom are already dead.
The list, accompanied by propaganda DVDs, was given to David Davis, the former shadow home affairs spokesman, and his Tory colleague Adam Holloway.
“What we got from the [Assad] government was a mixture of propaganda and self-delusion, mixed together with some hard facts,” Davis told the Sunday Telegraph.
The newspaper reports the documents list five women, including Khadijah Dare, a Muslim convert originally from London, whose son, Isa, nicknamed ‘Jihadi Junior,’ has appeared in IS propaganda, and Sally Jones, known as ‘Mrs Terror,’ who has recently issued a series of threats against the UK on social media.
Also on the list are two brothers from Cardiff, a group of young men from Portsmouth and teenage twin schoolgirls from Manchester who are believed to have joined IS.
Reyaad Khan, 21, from Cardiff, who was killed in a US drone strike last year after he was identified as being part of a jihadist hacker cell and as presenting a “clear and present danger” to the UK, is also featured on the list.
Other names include Mohammed Emwazi, also known as ‘Jihadi John,’ and Dr Isa Abdur Rahman, 26, a British doctor killed by a bomb in Syria in 2013 as he treated wounded civilians at a makeshift hospital.
Abdur was reportedly there to volunteer with a British charity and there was no justification given for his name being included on the list.
The list is written in Arabic, but the videos are narrated in English.
“This film showcases samples of those criminals who perpetrated the most atrocious crimes against the Syrian people,” the video says.
“They are random samples possessed by the Syrian state amongst tens of thousands in the private archive of those international murderers.”
A drone target list drawn up by the United States and Britain is believed to contain many of the same names.
Professor Antony Glees, director of the Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies at Buckingham University, told the Telegraph: “The real significance of the list is that it shows how hard Assad is trying to establish the credentials of his government while at the same time adding to David Cameron’s security headache in the region.
“Although these British [terrorist] names are well known to our own security services, the value of the intelligence will be details of aliases, or other information, which they might be using to return to the UK and plan terrorist attacks here.
“Assad is seeking to curry favor with the British government and, with his Russian backers [whose own security services may have contributed to the list], hopes to extend an olive branch of sorts to the West. With Putin on his side, it’s not easy to predict an early departure for the Syrian leader.”
