Via Independent:
Mohammed Emwazi, the Isis recruit from Britain now notorious as the savage executioner “Jihadi John”, gave up an earlier plan to join al-Shabaab in Somalia when a succession of friends were killed amid accusations of deceit and betrayal within the organisation.
The Londoner turned from his first choice for jihad because he feared for his own life too if he joined the group that controls a swathe of Somalia and has brought carnage across East Africa.
The extraordinary account of how he diverted from his preferred battleground in the Horn of Africa to become the masked murderer of Isis hostages came from a man who met him soon after his arrival in northern Syria, having apparently hoodwinked British security agencies to make his journey.
“He told me that if he had gone to Somalia he himself could well have been killed,” Ayman, who worked for Isis but denies ever being a member, told The Independent.
“It was strange – we were in the middle of a war and he wanted to talk about another war. Mohammed was obsessed with al-Shabaab, he was angry about what had happened in Africa: some of his friends have been killed, some sent to prison and he thought they had been betrayed.”
The foreign casualties in Somalia included Bilal al-Berjawi and Mohamed Sakr, members of a close-knit circle to which Emwazi belonged while growing up in north-west London. The three men knew Habib Ghani, the partner of Samantha Lewthwaite, the so-called “White Widow” of one of the 7/7 London bombers, along with Omar Hammami, an American jihadist. Emwazi was also an associate of Ali Adorus, now in prison in Ethiopia, whose family still lives in north London.
The men’s deaths were accompanied by claims in Islamist circles of vicious internal strife within al-Shabaab, with enemies being eliminated in collusion with Western intelligence services.
The so-called “London Boys” raised funds and disseminated propaganda for al-Shabaab; six of them underwent military training in Somalia as early as 2006. One of them was involved with a cell which attempted to carry out bombings in London in 2005, two weeks before the suicide bombing by Lewthwaite’s husband, Germaine Lindsay.