Britain acts to stem flow of young doctors recruited by Isis in Sudan

A British delegation, including an imam from London, have visited Sudan to try to dissuade young British doctors from joining Islamic State (Isis), which has been urgently seeking more foreign medics to help at its hospitals in Syria.

The Foreign Office is coordinating efforts to prevent more Britons travelling from Khartoum’s University of Medical Sciences and Technology (UMST). At least 17 British doctors travelled from there to Syria during 2015 to staff Isis’s health ministry.

It has emerged that a second group of UK doctors who left Sudan for Syria have joined up with members of an earlier group who travelled to join Isis in March.According to family sources, the second group of five Britons, including two brothers from Leicester, are understood to have joined up with 20-year-old Rowan Kamal Zine El Abidine, one of a group of nine British medical staff who journeyed from Khartoum months earlier.

Both groups were said, initially at least, to be under the control of Mohammed Fakhri, a 25-year-old from Middlesbrough who also attended UMST and styles himself as the recruiter of British medics for Isis. Currently believed to be in Raqqa after evading attempts to capture him in Turkey, Fakhri ran UMST’s Islamic Cultural Association, where he radicalised his fellow British students. The association has been shut down and numerous online traces of the group have been removed following pressure from the UK authorities.