Tale of two British Muslims: The doctor who went to Syria to save wounded children and was tortured to death, and the Hampshire boy from a loving family who turned into a terrorist



Abbas Khan was a surgeon who left his wife and children to go to Aleppo

His family were told on Monday he had hanged himself in a Syrian jail

Ifthekar Jaman grew up in Portsmouth where teachers noticed his talents

But he became a jihadi and followed the teachings of Anjem Choudary

He fought alongside Al Qaeda and recruited fellow extremists



Both grew up in this country, but played very contrasting roles in the Syrian uprising



Brave: Abbas Khan was a brilliant surgeon who left his wife and children to treat people on the frontline in Aleppo

The Doctor

After a British doctor disappeared during a mercy trip to war-torn Syria, there seemed little prospect of finding him alive amid the carnage and bloodshed.

Abbas Khan, a brilliant surgeon, left his wife and young children at home in London because he felt it was his ‘moral obligation’ to use the medical skills he had learned in Britain to help those less fortunate.

Having first travelled to refugee camps on the border with Turkey a year ago, the 32-year-old — who was a pupil at a rough inner London school before studying medicine at King’s College, London — decided to make a daring trip to help civilian victims inside Syria.

His plan was to go to Aleppo, a once prosperous city but now the scene of some of the fiercest fighting, to spend 48 hours treating as many people as he could without sleeping — before heading back across the border to Turkey.

He vanished while travelling around Aleppo. Alerted by his family in London, the British Foreign Office announced it could find no trace of him. The implication was that his plight was hopeless.

But Fatima Khan, his mother, had other ideas and vowed not to give up until she uncovered the truth.

After months of pestering the Syrian authorities, she was granted a visa to Damascus, the capital, and ignored the pleas of her other children not to risk her life by travelling there.

In Syria, Mrs Khan went to the Foreign Affairs Ministry to demand information about her son. Instead, she was berated with ‘endless lectures about why Britain was a bad country’.



She also ignored the constant attentions of President Bashar Al-Assad’s dreaded secret police who monitor, harass and kill anyone suspected of disloyalty.

Finally, eight months after Abbas went missing, Mrs Khan was taken to the notorious detention centre where she had discovered he was being held.

Abbas was close to death. Held in a cramped, darkened cell for eight months at the notorious Far’ Falastin detention centre, his weight had plummeted to 5st.

Upbringing: Mr Khan (left) was the eldest son of immigrants from Southern India and grew up in Streatham, South London

His arms and neck were covered in burns caused by guards who had stubbed out cigarettes on his flesh. He could only stagger, not walk. With Syrian secret police present, mother and son hugged. Abbas said: ‘Please Mum, please take me home.’

Fatima Khan remained in Damascus after that brief meeting. She persuaded officials to have Abbas transferred out of ‘The Tombs’ — the name given to the tiny cells where he was held and tortured — and to a civilian prison.

For the next four months, Mrs Khan was allowed to take him food. He gained weight and his health improved. The nightmare seemed to be finally over when, ten days ago, Mrs Khan was told by Syria’s foreign minister that her son would be released.

Back in London, the Khans were jubilant. ‘We were joking around that we would have nothing to do with our time once he was home,’ says Sara, 23, who had helped orchestrate a campaign on behalf of her brother from the family home in Mitcham, Surrey. ‘We didn’t know what it was going to feel like not worrying all the time.’

But there was to be no happy homecoming. Instead, the family were told on Monday by Syrian officials that Abbas had committed suicide, hanging himself with his own pyjamas.

No one believes this. Having survived torture, Abbas was healthy and looking forward to his supposedly impending release.

‘He can take showers and cook his own meals,’ his mother had said before this week’s shattering news. ‘In the other prison he couldn’t even see what he was eating. He was gaining strength and getting well. He said he would never do humanitarian work again.’ Yet it seems that there was never any prospect of Abbas being released alive — and back into the arms of his wife and two young children in Britain.

Indeed, one Syrian official privately told the dead doctor’s mother that her son ‘could have killed my son so we killed him instead’.

Abbas’s fate prompted Hugh Robertson, the British Foreign Office Minister, to accuse the regime of ‘murdering’ an innocent man whose sole reason for being in Syria was to help desperate women and children.

Disappeared: He vanished while travelling around the war-torn country. He was taken to a detention centre eight months after he went missing

However, the family were left ‘devastated, distraught and angry at the Foreign Office’ and accused it of ‘betrayal,’ saying that ‘delays and foot-dragging’ meant that Abbas’s plight was not treated with any urgency, despite the fact that smuggled letters spelling out his appalling treatment had been sent to William Hague, the Foreign Secretary.

Inevitably, there have been insinuations that there may have been more to Abbas’s trip than meets the eye, amid reports of dozens of so-called British jihadis flocking to join the war. It may be true, but I have found not a shred of evidence to support this view.

Instead, Abbas seems to have conducted his life in exemplary fashion, proving that discipline and hard work can lead to great success.

The second oldest son of immigrants from southern India, Abbas grew up in Streatham, South London, and attended the Ernest Bevin Secondary School before winning a place to study medicine at Kings College.

He loved Formula 1 motor racing and studiously followed the performance differences between the various cars.

As a teenager he even wrote to the head of Ferrari, the Italian motor sport team, pointing out a small adjustment they could make to their cars to gain speed.

Ferrari wrote back, thanking the English schoolboy for his observations and promising to ‘take a look’ at the measure he proposed.

After graduating in medicine, he gained experience at a variety of hospitals around England, deciding to specialise in orthopaedic surgery because it would enable him to use his technical skills, fixing bones.

Torn apart: His family, including son Abdullah (pictured) were left devastated after Syrian authorities claimed he had hanged himself in jail

During a trip to Egypt eight years ago — he had taken time out from work to study in Cairo, the capital — he fell in love with a local girl called Hana.

They married and moved back to London, settling into a house in Streatham and having two children — a boy, Abdullah, now seven, and a girl called Ruqquyah, six.

Abbas worked worked at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital in Stanmore, Middlesex, as well as the Epsom and St Helier University Hospitals Trust, specialising in trauma injuries.

Shah, 29, his younger brother, told me that he always looked up to Abbas. ‘Our school could be pretty lively, but I had him there to protect me. He wasn’t a violent man, but he was ferociously independent.’

Abbas was also acutely aware that, as the son of Indian immigrants to Britain, he had been extremely fortunate to have the opportunities afforded to him — and had an acute sense that his medical skills were a gift to be used to help others.

After cramming in extra hours working as a locum, by November 2012 he had saved enough cash to ensure his wife and young family would be secure while he volunteered to work for free helping injured refugees fleeing across the border into Turkey from Syria.

The experience changed him. ‘He was a different man when he came back,’ Shah, also a doctor, told me. ‘It had a profound effect on him, seeing young children bleeding to death and with limbs blown off.’

He returned to London and raised funds for medical supplies before going back to Turkey and deciding to slip into Syria to try to help women and children.

Incredibly, the Syrian authorities

did not even bother trying to pretend he had been involved in anything untoward.

Instead, he was ‘accused of an act of terrorism’ by treating injured women and children in Aleppo.

Family: Mr Khan (right) with his brother Afroze (left) and mother Fatima (centre) 1996

While even medical staff in Aleppo carried a gun for their own protection, Abbas had refused, saying ‘he was there to keep people alive, not kill them’.

Daily life in detention was a living hell. Abbas was beaten so badly he feared his legs would be broken.

He was held in solitary confinement for months on end, with no flushing toilets.

Rats and lice were everywhere. Abbas watched other prisoners being beaten to death and heard female inmates screaming in agony as they were battered and sexually abused.

As a Briton, it seems he was singled out for specially brutal treatment because of London’s support for rebels trying to oust the Assad regime.

And the ordeal of the family is not yet over. Fatima Khan was in neighbouring Lebanon last night, again trying to negotiate with Syrian officials — for the release of the body of her dead son.

Fatima and Afroze, her eldest son, were told that Czech officials in Damascus would be allowed to carry out an autopsy, which will ‘confirm the suicide claim’.

Syrian authorities said they would release the body once ‘all formalities’ had been carried out.

‘We don’t know when we will get my son back to Beirut,’ Fatima told me last night. ‘We just want to take him back to London as soon as we can.’

Afroze added: ‘Why would someone so cheerful and excited about being released, who was looking forward to seeing his young children, decide to commit suicide? We need an international investigation into his murder.’

...and the terrorist who grew up in a loving family and turned into a fanatic



Fanatic: Ifthekar Jaman was a self-proclaimed '5-star jihadi'

With big, deep dark brown eyes, a shy smile and a finger resting thoughtfully on his chin, he looks every bit the angelic infant. As he admitted, he was a ‘cute baby’ who developed a love of animals, archery and drawing during a happy childhood in Hampshire.



How different this adorable child appears from the man pictured in makeshift military fatigues in Syria.



Yet they are the same person — Ifthekar Jaman. And they illustrate only too graphically how a sweet little boy from a loving family grew up to become a radicalised Muslim. Jaman was the self-proclaimed ‘5-star jihadi’ who became a recruiting sergeant for the alarming number of radicalised British Islamic extremists fighting alongside Al Qaeda terrorists in Syria’s bloody civil war.



The photograph of Jaman the militant is the last taken of him — he was killed in a battlefield shoot-out in the eastern province of Deir al-Zour on Tuesday, aged just 23. In the months leading up to his death, he used Twitter to try to recruit other British Muslims to join him on his extremist campaign.



He posted pictures of a petrified young Syrian boy, probably no older than ten or 11, wearing khaki clothing and a military vest complete with pockets for ammunition, and wrote: ‘Ask yourselves, while this young man is holding magazines for the Islamic State, what are you doing for it?’



At some point in his transition from happy and innocent child to jihadist obsessed with war, Jaman fell under the spell of the fanatical British preacher, Anjem Choudary. Yesterday we heard Choudary’s poisonous creed broadcast on the airwaves when he appeared on Radio 4’s Today programme and repeatedly refused to condemn the barbaric murder last summer of Drummer Lee Rigby, whose killers Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale were convicted on Thursday.



Jaman was just one of the hundreds of young men influenced by Choudary. He was born in Portsmouth on May 8, 1990. His father, Enu Miah, 56, and mother, Hena Choudhury, 47, both from Bangladesh, own a takeaway curry restaurant in the city.



He lived with his parents and younger brothers Mohammed, 17, and Mustakim, 22, and elder sister, Tamannah Shaharin, 28, at their bay-fronted two-up, two-down terrace home in the Southsea area of the city.



Jaman attended local schools and was noted by teachers as a talented artist. But as he grew older he became increasingly shy.



Like so many teenagers, he began to rebel against his parents and community. Jaman scoured the internet to listen to the fundamentalists who fuelled his increasing sense of outrage and anger.



Upbringing: Jaman grew up as part of a loving family in Southsea, Portsmouth

He soon discovered the teachings of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American and Yemeni imam, who used the internet to disseminate his sermons full of hatred for the West and was eventually killed in a drone strike in Yemen in 2011.



After leaving school, Jaman worked by day as a Sky TV customer services assistant.



By night he searched the internet for increasingly extreme interpretations of the Koran, and he soon rejected the moderate teachings of his local mosque. It was after this that he became a follower of Anjem Choudary and travelled to London to hear the extremist’s speeches and attend his rallies.



Before long, Jaman was a regular feature on Portsmouth High Street where he would rant and rave about the failings of Western civilisation and democracy.



He became part of the Portsmouth Dawah Team, a proselytising group which had a stall in the town centre. Jaman used the power of social networking websites to disseminate his extremist message.



Using a variety of pseudonyms, including ‘Turab’ or ‘Abu Abdur Rahman’, he sent nearly 10,000 tweets about his radical interpretation of Islam to almost 3,000 followers.



His messages focused on his studies at an Islamic school in Portsmouth. He started learning Arabic and posted photographs of his Arabic tutor online. And in this way, the customer services assistant became the leader of a handful of Portsmouth extremists, some of whom went to Syria to fight alongside Al Qaeda.

Teachings: Jaman fell under the spell of Anjem Choudary, who has repeatedly refused to condemn the murder of fusilier Lee Rigby

Among them were a 19-year-old and a former Primark supervisor.



In May this year, Jaman flew to Turkey and crossed the border into the war-torn region.



He later explained that he was ‘trying to establish the law of God, the law of Allah’. From Syria, he launched an extraordinary campaign to persuade other Britons to fight alongside Al Qaeda to create an Islamist state.



He used photographs of child soldiers to goad Muslims in Britain, claiming the youngsters were ‘more manly’ than those who refused to take up arms,



From Syria, where there are said to be as many as 350 British jihadists, he posted recruitment videos on a number of websites, and tweeted that it didn’t matter whether new recruits spoke Arabic or not:



‘There are many like you and you will fit in.’

He said he was in the Syrian battlefield with Finnish, American, Australian, Italian and British Islamic extremists.



He advised a 17-year-old male who had contacted him through Twitter and was considering joining his fighters in Syria, that it felt ‘so cool’ to hold a gun. He said the jihadist group he had joined in Syria provided weaponry, food, accommodation, clothes and ‘a bit of pocket money’.



In one of his ‘recruitment’ tweets, he likened his mission in the country to some kind of upmarket adventure holiday: ‘There are people who think that the jihad in Syria is 24/7 fighting, but it is much more relaxed than that. They’re calling it a 5-star jihad.

Ideas: Jaman soon discovered the teachings of the Yemeni, extremist Imam, Anwar al-Awlaki

‘Any brother hoping to come, then come. Alone or with a group. Both are good. No money is required when you come.’



Meanwhile, his mother Hena was becoming increasingly concerned for her son’s safety. ‘I don’t know what’s going on but I’m scared for his life,’ she said last month.



By this time he was hinting on Twitter that British Muslims in Syria might never return home. He posted: ‘It is better for the authorities to allow these Muslims who want to migrate and do jihad. This way, we’re out of your way.’



And when he was interviewed in Syria for Newsnight he denied that British extremists fighting in Syria posed a threat to the UK authorities upon their return.

