One of the British “Beatles” jihadists captured in Syria after fighting with Isil had himself fled persecution from Islamic extremists as a child, The Telegraph can reveal.

El Shafee Elsheikh is from of a family of five that fled hardline Muslims targeting liberal intellectuals in their home country of Sudan.

His father, Rashid Sidahmed Elsheikh, had escaped from Sudan with his then wife, Maha, and their three children in the 1990’s fearing his liberal views put them in danger with the then pro-jihadi government.

For around five years, Sudan had harboured Osama Bin Laden who was believed to have used the country as a base for his terror network in the run up to the attacks on America in September 2001.

In 2015, Mr Elsheikh, a translator and poet, gave an interview explaining how he had fled the the North African country due to civil war and found refuge in London.

Despite the family’s harrowing experience of Islamic extremism, two of Mr Elsheikh’s three sons ended up joining Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Shafee went to Syria in 2012 and became a member of the infamous “Beatles”, while Mahmoud, the youngest, went there a few years later but was killed fighting near Tikrit in 2015.