From Brighton to the battlefield: how four young Britons were drawn to jihad

The play was called Don’t Judge Me, a satire that poked fun at tabloid stereotypes of British Muslims. It was written, directed and produced by a 15-year-old from Brighton named Amer Deghayes, who had taken inspiration from some of the less considered headlines of the Daily Mail and the Sun. “They were so ludicrous they made me laugh,” he told one of the adults who helped with the production. “The way they called young people feral, wow!” The play, which was set to a rap soundtrack performed by Amer’s own group, Blak n’ Deka, toured theatres on the south coast in 2010, winning awards and plenty of plaudits.

Amer, who had his sights set on becoming a serious journalist, was the eldest son in his family. Two of his brothers were twins, Abdulrahman and Abdullah, a year younger and both keen footballers. Next was Jaffar, a studious, slight 13-year-old who had always wanted to become a fireman. The brothers bonded through kickabouts in their local park and swimming, running across shingle beaches headfirst into the English Channel. On Facebook, pictures show a grinning Amer pretending to swallow a starfish beside Brighton pier.

When he wasn’t spending time with his family, Amer hung out with his best friend, Ibrahim Kamara, a refugee from Sierra Leone. They did everything together, often writing rap tracks and politicised film scripts. Their last joint project was to have been a documentary exploring the insecurities of adolescence, titled Me, Myself & Before. In a fundraising pitch from November 2012, Amer and Ibrahim wrote: “It is a time in life when we are uncertain of the future, when some feel different, isolated and lonely. Teenagers are often confused and feel like outcasts.”

Their request for funds was made by Cultures Club, a Brighton youth arts organisation, and approved by the Heritage Lottery Fund. But by the time the funding was confirmed in the summer of 2013, it was too late – Cultures Club had lost all contact with Ibrahim and Amer.

In fact, in October 2013, Amer left Brighton for Syria, where he joined a radical Islamist militia fighting Bashar al-Assad’s army. Ibrahim soon joined him, along with two of Amer’s younger brothers, Jaffar and Abdullah. Two years later, only Amer is still alive.The young men left behind a large group of friends in Brighton, many of whom also appear to have been radicalised. Among them, police identified at least 20 people they deemed likely to travel to Syria; most of them were under 18, and at least half were converts from non‑Muslim backgrounds. Together, these teenagers so alarmed the authorities that Brighton’s senior police officers and council chiefs held secret meetings in early 2014 to discuss the possibility of a terror attack from its residents – and the seaside city was placed on the register of areas requiring extra support under the government’s counter-extremism strategy.

The question of what motivates young British men and women to leave their homes and join jihadist groups fighting in Syria has been the subject of heated public debate. The prevailing orthodoxy cites Islamist ideology as the principal driver – and it is obviously a necessary element, if not always the predominant motivation. What has been less understood is the process by which young people grow alienated with their own country, and seek the validation of their identity in a faraway civil war.