“I was more inclined to those interpretations of Islam which are inclined towards a [terror] attack. Now my view has changed, dramatically.”
Would his view have changed if the Islamic State caliphate hadn’t been destroyed and he hadn’t been captured?
In any case, the authorities of shattered, staggering, dhimmi Britain will probably allow him and his comrades to return. At this point, Britain is so far gone that they might as well make him Prime Minister.
“Odious arrogance of a Jihadi ‘Beatle’: Jailed Londoner Alexanda Kotey who helped Jihadi John murder western hostages tells RICHARD PENDLEBURY he was a torturer but begs from his Syrian prison: ‘Why can’t I come home?,'” by Richard Pendlebury, Daily Mail, September 20, 2019 (thanks to Henry):
Alexanda Kotey has just received a letter from his mother. Among other news she tells him that his teenage daughter in London has ‘finished her GCSEs and is starting college’.
Naturally, Kotey is pleased at her progress. But circumstances mean he remains very much a hands-off parent. The letter arrived not via the Royal Mail but the International Red Cross. This is because Kotey, 35, is in custody in northern Syria.
He tells me he has done little to warrant this detention. Others like him might have done wrong; it is for God to judge. But he himself, he says, is no more than an ‘over-rated and over-stated’ international ‘scapegoat’. The world nonetheless continues to regard him as ‘Jihadi Ringo’, one of the so-called ‘Jihadi Beatles’ — Mohammed Emwazi (John), Aine Davis (Paul)and El Shafee Elsheikh (George) — who got the nickname because of their British accents.
This was the quartet of Islamic State extremists who came to personify the worst excesses of the murderous caliphate which, between 2014 and 2016, conquered vast swathes of Syria and Iraq.
Countless thousands were killed, raped or enslaved in its name. Footage of gruesome executions of Western hostages and other prisoners was broadcast to the world.
Kotey’s close friend from West London, Mohammed Emwazi, aka ‘Jihadi John’, was said to be the man who wielded the beheading knife in several of these atrocity videos. Emwazi was later killed in a targeted air-strike.
Kotey has been accused of torturing IS hostages. It has been reported that the Crown Prosecution Service has enough evidence to charge him with five murders….
This week, I spent several hours with Kotey — the longest one-on-one interview with a member of the ‘Beatles’ — in a small, guarded room somewhere in this war-ravaged scrap of Mesopotamia. I also talked to another British Islamist prisoner, a former porter at the King Edward VII hospital, in Central London, where the Queen had knee surgery and the Duchess of Cambridge was treated for morning sickness.
The tales they tell of their roles in the nightmare caliphate are markedly different. But they have one thing in common.
In April 1945, the war correspondent Martha Gellhorn wrote a scathing essay on the refusal of the Germans she had met to admit any complicity with Adolf Hitler’s defeated regime. ‘No one is a Nazi. No one ever was,’ the piece began.
This denial of personal participation in, or responsibility for, the state’s organised barbarity can also be heard today across the camps and prisons of north-east Syria….
The question has become a diplomatic hot potato. Who on earth would want these people back?
Certainly not the vast majority of the British public who have seen a number of mass attacks in this country by IS sympathisers.
And yet earlier this month, U.S. Defence Secretary Mark Esper visited London to urge the British government to repatriate its own nationals. Their continued presence in the Middle East was destabilising the region, he said. This seems unlikely to happen soon. The UK Government has recently revoked the citizenships of a number of prominent IS adherents, including Kotey, ‘Jihadi Jack’ Letts, the son of an Oxfordshire farmer, and teenage East Londoner Shamima Begum, who gave birth to a child in a refugee camp….
He says he ‘verbally converted to Islam at the age of 19, but did not change his lifestyle until his early 20s.
‘It was the year of the 7/7 bombings in London, 2005,’ he recalls. It was around this time he first met Jihadi John. They both attended the Al Manaar Muslim Cultural Heritage Centre off Ladbroke Grove. ‘It had pictures of Prince Charles on the walls, because he did the inauguration.’ He chuckles.
In 2012, he left for Syria….
The $64,000 question is what Kotey really did in the caliphate between arriving and leaving.
Hadn’t he been accused of taking part in the torture by IS of Western hostages? ‘If you could call it torture, yes, that happened,’ he begins, cautiously.
I tell him he was accused of administering electric shocks. ‘No, never. Only physical beatings . . . A detainee was struck by myself and others —punched.’ He explains such brutality all quite matter-of-factly….
He wants to face trial in the UK.
‘It would be preferable to do prison time in the country of my birth, where my family is. That is just logical.
‘If you want me to be frank, I was more of a danger — to the population — before I left the UK.
‘I was more inclined to those interpretations of Islam which are inclined towards a [terror] attack. Now my view has changed, dramatically.’…