A FORMER comrade of Osama bin Laden and key architect of the Afghan jihad against the Russians has urged British Muslims not to join Isis.
Abdullah Anas is the most senior former jihadist to warn that Britons are being “brainwashed” by the terrorist group in Syria. In his first British newspaper interview, Anas said Isis was exploiting conflict to advance its own agenda, rather than helping oppressed Syrians.
He denounced the group’s beheadings and mass rape as “completely against Islam” and said the Koran called for prisoners to be treated with the same compassion as orphans and the poor. “This jihad is not legitimate,” Anas told The Sunday Times.
Anas spoke out after at least 700 British Muslims, including girls as young as 15, travelled to Syria and Iraq to join Isis and other jihadist groups such as Jabhat al-Nusra, an affiliate of al-Qaeda. As many as 30,000 foreign fighters have headed to the Middle East, including up to 5,000 from Europe.
The influx of foreign recruits has echoes of the Muslim fighters who flocked to Afghanistan in the 1980s to help defeat the occupying Soviet army. Anas, 57, an Algerian who lives in Britain, was one of the first to arrive. He was drawn to the region after meeting Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian cleric widely regarded as the “Father of Jihad” and bin Laden’s spiritual mentor.
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In 1984, Anas and Azzam founded the Services Bureau, an office in Peshawar, near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, which recruited thousands of foreign fighters. Bin Laden joined the office in 1985 and became a key fundraiser for the Afghan cause.
Anas says the 4,000 foreign recruits who travelled to the area were involved in a legitimate jihad, or holy war, against a foreign aggressor.
He says their main aim was to help native Afghans.
“Sheikh Abdullah Azzam said, ‘You are coming to help your brothers, so let your brothers tell you what to do.’ They told us their priorities — schools, hospitals, training camps and so on. But what Isis and al-Qaeda are doing [in Syria], they are bringing their own agenda.”
Anas said the main priority of such groups was to create an Islamic state, or caliphate, rather than to help Syrians oppressed by the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.
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Anas, who married Azzam’s daughter, sought asylum in the UK in 1996. He urged young British Muslims not to fall for Isis’s slick propaganda on social media, adding: “You are not helping [your Syrian brothers].”
As well as being close to bin Laden before he founded al-Qaeda, Anas fought alongside Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Afghan commander who later led the Northern Alliance. He said captured Russians were treated with respect with some becoming friends and converting to Islam. By contrast, Isis has thrived on killing hostages and prisoners and using minority Yazidi women and girls as sex slaves. “This kind of jihad I did not witness with Azzam or Massoud,” Anas said. “This is completely against Islam.”
Anas, who preaches at mosques in London, said the Koran advocated being “rough” with your enemy in battle, but prisoners of war had to be shown mercy.
“In jihad, there are manners and rules,” he said, quoting a text by Azzam. Anas said the “bloodthirsty” mentality of Isis could fill those returning to Britain from Syria with “hatred for their own society”. Security services across Europe are on high alert in case such returnees try to mount a terrorist attack.
Ayoub El-Khazzani, 26, is alleged to have plotted a shooting massacre on a high-speed train from Amsterdam to Paris this month after recently returning from Syria.
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Although foreign fighters helped to liberate Afghanistan from Soviet rule, the country descended into civil war. Anas arrived in Britain and argued that he could not return to Algeria, partly because of his role in Afghanistan and his earlier involvement in Islamist politics. He settled in Brent, northwest London, and became a British citizen in 2008.
Anas rejects al-Qaeda, which was established in 1988, but has mixed memories of bin Laden. “I am torn between two Osamas,” he said. “The one in my heart who I remember [from the Afghan jihad] as a very high-mannered and polite man; and the one in my brain, the leader of al-Qaeda, responsible for bloodshed everywhere — that man is not someone I can love.”