BRITAIN STRIPS JIHADIST OF PASSPORT DESPITE SUPPLYING WEAPONS TO HIS ISLAMIST GROUP IN SYRIA

by Kevin Scott

The youngest son of Abu Hamza has been stripped of his British passport after travelling to Syria to fight with jihadists. The Home Office has withdrawn the passport of Sufiyan Mustafa, 22, leaving him effectively stateless and stranded in Syria.

His Egyptian father, now 58, is currently in jail in the US after being convicted of a series of terrorism offences and has been serving his sentence in solitary confinement at a high security jail in Florence, Colorado.

Hamza rose to notoriety in 1997 after becoming imam of the Finsbury Park mosque, in north London, and supporting the 9/11 attacks on the United States in 2001. Previously, he had returned badly injured from Afghanistan where he claimed he had fought with the Taliban against the Soviet invasion. Despite granting him citizenship in 1980 after he had married a British women who had converted to Islam, the British government later spent a decade trying to kick him out of the country before he was finally extradited to the US five years ago.

Abu Hamza

His youngest son is fighting alongside rebel groups after fleeing Britain in 2013 following the extradition of his father to the US to stand trial. He denies fighting for Islamic State or with al-Qaida-linked groups claiming his group had received British and American weapons to fight the Syrian Government.

In an interview with an Arabic newspaper, he spoke of his annoyance at being branded a terrorist, when the British Government had supplied his group with weapons and said he would return to Britain when the government of President Bashar al-Assad has fallen and the fighting has stopped. He said:

"Britain is the place where I was born and lived. I have never been a threat to national security in Britain and will not commit aggression on its population, because our religion does not allow attacks on unarmed innocents." 

However, he admitted taking part in battles in Aleppo and boasted about the killing of Assad supporters. Last month, he appeared in a jihadist propaganda video where he condemned Assad, but also criticised Islamic State for giving Islam a bad name.

Thirty three people have now been stripped of their British citizenship as a result of their involvement in Islamic terrorism.

However, the claim by Hamza's youngest son that the British government is supplying weapons to Islamist groups, including his own, despite cancelling his British passport, thus denying him the chance to return to his London home, throws into doubt the commitment of the Tory government to combat Islamic terrorism, both at home and abroad. About 800 British citizens traveled to Syria and Iraq to fight for Islamist groups, including those armed with British and American weapons, and about 400 still remain, despite Islamic State, and associated groups, facing defeat in both countries as a result of ongoing Russian and Western intervention.

However, the controlled media is now trying to push the West into open warfare with the Syrian Government claiming a recent chemical attack is the work of its forces. And even US President, Donald Trump, is starting to echo this fake outrage, despite his previous opposition to US intervention in the Middle East and hostility towards the mainstream media.

Despite these liberal media assertions, in 2013, Carla del Ponte, a Swiss member of the UN Independent International Committee of Inquiry in Syria, said there were "strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof" that rebels seeking to oust the Syrian Government had used chemical weapons against the population, rather than the forces of Bashar al-Assad, who later claimed any remaining weapons had been destroyed.

Despite the efforts of British and American-backed jihadists, such as Abu Hamza's son, Assad is winning the war in Syria and has attracted substantial Russian and Iranian support in his efforts to end the CIA-staged civil war.

As a result, the Western powers are now trapped between trying to continue to destabilise Syria, probably on Israel's behalf, if you look at who shouts loudest for military intervention, or allowing Islamic State, and other jihadists, some of whom they had previously armed, another chance to gain momentum, across the Middle East and beyond, if Assad is weakened or removed.

Why would Assad, and his Russian and Iranian supporters, risk Western intervention at this stage of the war by mounting an attack on civilians using chemical weapons?

And why, despite anti-terrorist gestures at home, and moralising rhetoric overseas, does the British government under Theresa May continue to arm Islamic terrorist groups in Syria?

Originally published at Civil Liberty