Today’s Sunday Times carries the fascinating tale of Khalid Kelly, an Irish jihadist currently undertaking weapons training in the tribal areas of Pakistan. ‘His dream is to face a British soldier in combat, although he would “settle” for an American’, or so the Times reports.
Kelly, 42, is an unconventional jihadist. Having grown up a staunch Catholic and trained as a nurse, he moved to Saudi Arabia in 1996 to work at the King Faisal hospital on a tax-free salary. In 2000 he was introduced to radical Islam by an Afghan when he was serving time in the Al-Ha’ir prison in Riyadh for bootlegging.
There are two details of his story which are particularly important. This is the first one, Kelly was initially radicalised in a Saudi jail. On the day that the Times also carries the story Terrorists smuggle fatwas out of secure prisons, which draws on a new report by Quilliam investigating the radicalising activities of al-Qaeda linked extremists held in British jails, this is a chilling reminder of the need to stop prisons from becoming “universities of terror” as the report’s author puts it.
As for the second detail:
Kelly moved to the UK in 2002 where he joined Al-Muhajaroun, the now disbanded hardline Islamic organisation, and an associate of radical clerics Omar Bakri Mohammed and Anjem Choudary. He achieved notoriety in 2007 when he declared the London bombings of 7 July a “happy day”.
“If I had had the opportunity, I would have been on those tube trains. But my time in London was to give the call,” he said. [...]
Kelly now sees his time in the West as mental preparation for jihad, claiming he spent a lot of time on the internet learning how to make bombs. He left the UK in 2008 after some friends were arrested for extremist behaviour during a protest about the Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed.
After a period underground, Kelly has now re-emerged in Pakistan’s Swat valley, where the army recently drove out the Taliban in a three-month military operation.
This is yet more evidence of the direct link between al-Muhajiroun (which, despite what the Times reports, is still active under the name al-Muhajiroun) and Islamist terrorists. They may be a bunch off ill-educated hot-heads, but they have a bad habit of producing jihadists and we ignore them at our peril.
The article concludes with a concise summary of the hatred Kelly first learned in a Saudi jail but which crystallised under al-Muhajiroun’s tutelage.
“I always believe Islam is terrorism. We are told to terrorise the enemies of Islam,” he said. “The world will become a dangerous place. Everybody had better start embracing Islam or people will start flying planes into buildings again.”
When will the Home Office pull its collective finger out and ban this hateful organisation?