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London Mayor Boris Johnson has branded religious fundamentalists recruited by terror groups such as Islamic State (IS) as "w******" who are obsessed with pornography.

Mr Johnson took aim at Islamic extremists in an interview with The Sun newspaper, suggesting they were young men who were low on self-esteem.

According to the paper Mr Johnson said: "If you look at all the psychological profiling about bombers, they typically will look at porn. They are literally w******. Severe onanists.

"They are tortured. They will be very badly adjusted in their relations with women, and that is a symptom of their feeling of being failure and that the world is against them. They are not making it with girls and so they turn to other forms of spiritual comfort - which of course is no comfort.

"They are just young men in desperate need of self-esteem who do not have a particular mission in life, who feel that they are losers and this thing makes them feel strong - like winners."

He also said he felt efforts to tackle extremism should come from within Muslim communities but claimed clerics had not been "persuasive in the right way with these people".

More than 500 Britons are thought to have gone to Iraq and Syria to fight with IS, while a report this week found many Western women in IS were "desensitised" to violence carried out by the militants and encouraged it on social media.

It is not the first time Mr Johnson has been outspoken on terrorism - on a recent visit to the Kurdish regional capital Irbil, he called on the Government to supply sophisticated weaponry to Kurdish peshmerga fighters battling IS terrorists.

But he suggested that ministers were nervous about doing so because they feared they could be used by the Kurds to establish their own separate state, independent of the Iraqi government in Baghdad.

Additional reporting by the Press Association