I want to talk to you about the mindset of an extremist
and it seems kind of disappointing to be having this conversation in 2015.
When at the start of 2011 I was filled with great optimism and hope
it seemed like the challenge and the fight
against extremism and tyranny was really moving somewhere.
The two most important figure heads of Al Qaeda
Osama Bin Laden and Anwar Al-Awlaki were both dead
and we saw these huge popular mobilizations across North Africa
in a way that we’d never ever thought conceivable or possible
I went to Tahrir square to witness the uprising there.
And it made complete sense for me to go.
I’d grown up in Saudia Arabia, spent 14 years of my life there
so I counted a number of Egyptians as some of my closest friends.
I wanted to witness their heroic struggle. And did so.
Later, when the uprisings and unrest moved the Syria
I began to call my Syrian friends, who again, I had met in Saudi Arabia
to get a better sense of what was happening in that country
and with the uprisings there.
They told me remarkable stories of how protestors were taking to the streets
singing songs demanding their freedom.
They all met with a hail of bullets.
People were arrested, disappeared, tortured, subject to sexual violence.
But they carried on.
When the uprising moved to an area of Homs
Homs was the epicenter of this uprising
I was put in touch with something called the Baba Amr media center.
The Baba Amr media center was a group of activists
within a district at Homs who were smuggling journalists into that town
so they could tell the story of what was happening in Syria.
The Syrian regime surrounded Baba Amr and sealed it hermetically.
Nobody could get in.
But more importantly, nobody could get out.
They shelled it remorselessly.
Hundreds of people died.
You began to see at that point by the middle of 2012
The lawlessness that was descending over Syria.
The sheer of desperation, the collapse of civil society.
The sense that people were becoming desperate, no one knew
what they could do to protect themselves, to protect their families. And that was the thing.
It wasn’t just the activists that were being targeted.
It was anybody connected to them: a friend, a parent, a wife, a child.
And in fact, just think of this.
Yesterday marked the three year anniversary of the Houla massacre.
That was a massacre that the Syrian regime committed, where it slaughtered, with knives
not just men of fighting age but women and children.
So, in that context
with that desperation, with that sense of hopelessness setting in
only one thing was inevitable.
That in that power vacuum, into that breach
one group of people were going to arise.
The jihadists and the black flags arrived into the Syrian revolution
a revolution lost and now surrendered between the false dichotomies of the tyranny of Assad
and Islamic State on the other hand.
What's so remarkable about what’s happening in Syria
is that it’s not just the territory that these groups have taken.
It’s not just the amount of land that they are now holding, which is staggering in and of itself
but it’s the sheer scale of radicalization that we’ve seen globally.
Part of my work at King’s College now is to try and track the flow of foreign fighters into this conflict.
We believe that there is something like 15 thousand people who have made that journey to Syria
from 90 different countries.
That’s a huge, huge breathtaking scale of mobilization.
It’s very easy to just dismiss and to write off everyone who goes as a fanatical terrorist.
Some of them clearly are. Some of them hold very strongly to the notion of what Islamic State
is trying to create and of what it’s trying to do.
They’ve had long histories of radical activism and association
in their home countries before migrating to Syria.
But I’ve had an opportunity to talk to around about 100 people who’ve gone from Europe.
And I say that there is a typology. One type as they say is the committed radical that I’ve just told you about.
But the other type of person I found was people who were going in 2012
in 2013 who felt a sense of hopelessness for the Syrians.
They said: look, the world has abandoned these people.
No one helped them. No one came to defend them.
So we’ve come to do it. I call them humanitarian jihadists.
Then, there's martyrdom seekers.
People for whom the objective is to die as quickly as possible when they get to Syria.
They believe that once they get there
if they die, they’ll be martyred, they’ll go straight to heaven.
And so, their whole ambition just to achieve that as quickly as possible.
We’ve already had 5 British suicide bombers in Syria and Iraq
one from the United States, and several others from across Europe.
And then, the last category I think is the most interesting one.
These are people for whom the conflict really speaks to their sense of their own adventure
their sense of self, their sense of masculinity, and it’s a bit of fun.
They’ve coined their own phrase, the five star jihad, and they try to encourage people to come on that basis.
And they reference popular culture. So here you can see them referencing a popular video game "Call of Duty."
And for them it’s about all of that.
When I talk to these fighters, when I study them, when I look at their lives, I get it.
I get the guy who is talking about the need for an Islamic state because
they believe it’s an obligation from god and because they believe it’s going to be
the only political power left that is going to stand and defend Muslims.
I understand the guy who says that the world abandoned Syria
and that no one was there to defend them against the regime determined
to kill every man, women or child that bore an atom’s weight of resistance towards it.
I get the guy who says that he’ll go to paradise if he dies on the battlefield.
And I understand and I sympathize with those who say “you know it’s kind of cool.”
It's kind of fun to go out there and do this. It's like a holiday camp for some of these guys.
I get it not just because I study them; I get it because half a generation ago, that was me.
I joined a radical Islamic group after September 11th called Hizb ut-Tahrir.
Which campaigns for a global caliphate
not too dissimilar to the one you see currently operating in parts of Syria and Iraq.
The narrative was kind of similar at the time.
We believed that there was a war on Islam.
That the West was persecuting and killing Muslims and now the United States was spearheading that campaign
And everywhere we looked we saw Muslims dying.
Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Chechnya. There was a conspiracy and there was an attack against us.
Someone had to fight back. Somebody did.
In 2004, there were the Madrid bombings. In 2005 there was a 7/7 terrorist attack in London
and in 2007, my best friends blew up Glasgow Airport.
We didn’t think what we were doing was wrong.
We didn't believe that what we were about was in any way questionable.
Quite the opposite. Here we were, defending our lives, our honor, our dignity, our religion, from persecution.
And from oppression.
What could be more just and noble than that?
By contrast, that narrative spread so strongly
and it continues to resonate today on a much larger scale
in the Syrian context. The West is very shy of its values.
It doesn’t speak up enough for the ideas of classical liberalism.
Or its post-enlightenment values that have birthed centuries
of organic growth across all spheres: legal, political, cultural, artistic.
We are a little shy to speak about these values. We are unsure of them, they make us feel uneasy.
And then you contrast that against this.
What Islamic State is offering is bold, it’s confident, it’s fine, it’s empowering.
Islamic State knows exactly who it is.
It knows exactly what it stands for.
It knows exactly where it’s going.
And what it’s doing.
That identity makes sense to people. It’s not confused.
It’s not hyphenated. It’s not British-Muslim, African-American, this or that.
No! It transcends all of that. You are a Muslim.
You are part of something much bigger, you transcend geography, you transcend race and culture.
You are a Muslim.
You enter something much bigger.
A fraternity of the faithful.
It’s incredibly powerful.
It’s incredibly seductive for these young people.
A lot of people talk about their journey into extremism.
I haven’t really spoken so much about mine but I want to tell you about the flip side of that.
The way out.
I read a lot about this issue of identity because ultimately it all boils down to that.
The sense of needing to belong.
When Mohammed Siddique Khan orchestrated and led the 7/7 terrorist attacks in London
he talked about the bombing, gassing, imprisonment of his people.
By which he was referring to the Iraqis
And to a country he’d never been to whilst in the process of planning the murder of his own citizens.
So it’s about that sense of belonging.
It's about making sense of that.
I had began to read about how Muslims could live in the modern era
about Islam's relationship with democracy, about modern sense of the civic self and so on.
That’s all very convincing. It’s all very interesting, but it’s not enough.
Your emotional prize is very strong.
I’d invested years of my life into Hizb ut-Tahrir.
I knew that if I left, there would be huge challenges, emotional challenges
that if I leave, I have to give up my friends
that if I leave, I have to rebuild my life again from scratch and my identity.
It's a very very difficult process, and it's a very very difficult thing to do.
So, I wanted to believe they were right.
I wanted to reengage with Hizb ut-Tahrir and to revive that and I had to find a way of doing that.
And then, a few weeks before I left, I thought I found that moment.
The organization had put together
a protest outside the Uzbek embassy in London to protest against human rights abuses in the country.
I thought this is something that I can absolutely get behind.
So I went along with the protest and I thought this was going to reenergize me
Renew my commitment to the organization and then standing there outside the embassy
I made two realizations.
Which will sound really simple.
It’s almost embarrassing to stand here and say: “you know I realized these two things”
but actually, at the time, it was a revolution in my mind.
The first was that you can still stand for all the same things that you always stood for.
Stand against oppression. Stand against tyranny.
Stand for people who are suffering injustice.
Without being a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir.
In fact, here we were trying to replace one tyranny with another.
So, I still believe in the same thing. I want Assad to fall.
But I don’t want Islamic State or the other jihadists to succeed.
I want to back and be with the people in the middle.
The ordinary, suffering Syrian who just wants to live a free life.
The second realization I made
was that it was only the secular state, secular Britain
that was allowing me to do this and to propagate these views whilst there.
And it was only the secular state that was going to guarantee the rights
of everybody to live the life that they want to live.
And to be who they want to be.
It was only that secular neutral space
that was going to allow me to live my life the way I wanted to and to be who I wanted to be.
And the moment that penny drops
The moment you have that realization
You understand that you have an idea
that is far more powerful and far more seductive
than the extremist could ever offer.
Thank you