Hanzalah Patel and Safwaan Mansur – Convicted of Preparing for Terrorist Acts

May 20, 2019 Article

Two friends convicted of preparing for terrorist acts in support of the so-called Islamic State after trying to reach Syria have been jailed.

Safwaan Mansur, from Birmingham, and Hanzalah Patel, from Leicester, travelled to Turkey in 2016 and 2017 after checking out an area near the Syrian border on TripAdvisor, a two-week trial was told.

Prosecutors alleged that the men had attempted to explain away their travel plans as an “innocent camping holiday”.

The men were each sentenced at Birmingham Crown Court on Monday to 14 years in prison, West Midlands Police said.

At the men’s trial, jurors heard that the pair, who spent nine days in jail in Turkey in 2017 after being arrested at an Istanbul hotel, bought camping equipment, outdoor survival clothing and airline tickets before travelling initially to Germany.

Prosecutors alleged that Mansur, 22, of Hampton Road, Aston, and Patel, also 22, of Frederick Road, Leicester, undertook a 24-hour bus journey from Istanbul to near the Syrian border during a previous visit to Turkey in 2016.

The men were arrested at Heathrow Airport in 2017 after being reported missing by family members.

Patel’s father contacted police in June that year after becoming concerned, having learned that his son had lied about leading prayers at a mosque in Germany.

During subsequent questioning by police, the men’s trial heard that Mansur said he had gone to Turkey’s Hatay province – described in court as a “transit area” for Syria – in 2016 to “have a look” like “lots of other tourists”.

Claiming items including water purifiers and solar chargers were found in the men’s luggage, Simon Davis, prosecuting, told the court: “Mr Patel, when interviewed, throughout maintained a no comment stance, as was his right.”

Jurors were told that Mansur said items in his luggage were gifts for friends at a mosque in Germany, where he intended to stop off en route to or from Turkey.

Outlining Mansur’s account, Mr Davis told the jury panel: “The people at the mosque liked outdoor pursuits like camping – that was the explanation being given.”

Lawyers acting for both defendants said the men had formed a “naive and idiotic” plan to cross into Syria, but had no intention of fighting or committing acts of terrorism.

However, jurors convicted the pair after trial, on April 1.

Following sentencing, acting head of the West Midlands Counter Terrorism Unit Chief Superintendent Shaun Edwards said: “If anyone is concerned that a friend or family member is thinking of travelling to Syria, it is very important that they tell us as soon as possible.

“Police and other agencies can offer support to help safeguard those who are vulnerable to radicalisers.

“The sooner we can intervene, the better chance we have of preventing people from becoming embroiled in the conflict and facing potential prosecution.”

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Categories: Hanzalah Patel, Islamic State, News, Safwaan Mansur, Syria

Roman Kneblewski – An Ultra-Nationalist, Anti-Migrant and anti-LGBT Activist in Finchley

March 13, 2019 Article

The Polish Catholic Parish in Finchley has just announced on it’s website that this year it’s Lent Retreat – (17 to 20 March) – will be led by Roman Kneblewski, a radical priest from Poland known for his ultra-nationalist, anti-immigrant and anti-LGBT messages:

Kneblewski repeatedly praised ONR (‘Obóz Narodowo-Radykalny’ or ‘National-Radical Camp’), a Polish Fascist youth movement.

He is on record as saying:

“I wouldn’t condemn Fascism. If by Fascism we mean Francoism for example, which saved Catholic Spain from communist criminals, then I’m all for it.”

He also expressed full support for Jacek Międlar, an extremist former priest who is banned from entering the U.K. Kneblewski stated that Międlar’s anti-Semitic and hateful rhetoric is in fact a “language of love”. He also called Międlar “a good Catholic and a good Pole”.

Photo of Kneblewski and Międlar together

In a sermon, Kneblewski repeatedly called refugees heading for Europe an “invasion of Islamists”, adding that should they come to Poland, they would “slit throats, rape women and force children to become Muslims”.

In the same sermon he stated:

“Those invaders come here and they want benefits which they see as a tribute owed to them by us, infidel dogs” and: “Whoever encourages to accept those invaders is a sinner”.

On his Facebook profile, he wrote: “The Qur’an should be burned! Burn it, nothing else!”

He also approved of burying pig carcasses on mosque construction sites as a possible method of preventing mosques from being built.

Kneblewski is also known for his hostility to LGBT communities. In an online sermon he called homosexuality a “heinous perversion”.

Speaking about Anna Grodzka, the first Polish transgendered politician, Kneblewski stated:

“Some individuals shouldn’t even see a psychiatrist but a vet. And I will have to see a gastro-enterologist as I’m getting a gag reflex”.

Kneblewski also hosted a lecture by Paul Cameron, an American anti-LGBT pseudo-scientist, in his parish in Poland. The lecture was titled “The Myths of Homo-Propaganda”.

Considering there are thousands of Catholic priests in Poland, most of whom preach a message of love, peace and respect, one has to ask why would the Polish Parish in Finchley choose such an individual to lead their faithful during a Lent Retreat? It is a legitimate question and we will be letting the relevant authorities know.

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Categories: Jacek Miedlar, LGBT hate, News, Polish Catholic Parish, Roman Knebleswki

Bosnian women struggle to return female relatives, children from Syria

March 11, 2019 Article

A quarter of a century after their own country was devastated by war, three Bosnian women are struggling to bring home loved ones caught up in Syria’s ruinous conflict and the collapse of Islamic State rule.

The Bosnian government, in common with its counterparts across Europe, lacks a clear plan to deal with the families of defeated fighters of the ultra-hardline militant group.

For Bosnia, the predicament has a particular historical resonance: Bosnian Muslims generally practise a mainstream form of Islam, but some adopted radical beliefs from the foreign fighters who came to the country during its 1992-95 war and fought with Muslims against Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats.

When Syria’s war broke out in 2011, some Bosnians joined Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. But the three Bosnian women say the daughters and a sister whose return they seek — plus their nine children — have played no role in militancy.

“Our only goal is to bring our children back home and finish this agony as soon as possible,” said Senija Muhamedagic from the northwestern town of Cazin, who joined forces with two other women to press authorities to help their relatives return.

Their daughters and sister, stuck with their children in a camp in northern Syria since November 2017, are desperate to return, saying they were forced to go to Syria by radicalised husbands and were ready to face charges at court if needed.

Alema Dolamic, whose sister was left widowed with three children after her husband was killed in fighting in 2017, has created a closed Facebook page for families of the people from the Western Balkans who are still in Syria to exchange information.

“It’s been going for five years, I practically don’t have my life anymore,” Dolamic told Reuters in her home near the central town of Tesanj.

“I am trying to imagine reunion with her, with children, but it’s unimaginable,” she said, showing the pictures of the children on her phone.

“THE CHILDREN ARE NOT GUILTY”

Hundreds of people are believed to have left Europe to fight for Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. With the Islamist militant group down to its last shred of territory, more and more of them are asking to come home.

According to Bosnian intelligence, 241 adults and 80 children left from 2012-2016 from Bosnia or the Bosnian diaspora for Syria and Iraq, where 150 more children were born.

About 100 adults, including 49 women, remained there while at least 88 have been killed or died. About 50 have returned to Bosnia, including seven children.

“I feel terrible, miserable, because the children are not guilty, they did not have a choice,” said the third woman, from Sarajevo, awaiting a government decision on the repatriation of her 22-year-old daughter and her two children from Syria.

“Every day I think, my God, when will this child of mine come, to see her, to hold her, to feel her, and then anything may happen, it won’t matter anymore.”

The three women have been talking to police, security and intelligence agencies and government ministries for more than a year, supplying them with information and documents in the hope that their children, who they say were not involved in any military activities, would come back.

But as elsewhere in Europe, the Bosnian authorities have been slow to address the families’ pleas, their concern being the security challenges that might arise with the return of people from a war zone and environment of militancy.

REPATRIATION STILL NOT IN SIGHT

Their reunion still seems distant.

The Bosnian central government announced last year it would set up a coordination body to deal with the return of Islamic fighters and their families, but it has yet to be formed. It does not help that a new government has not been established after a general election in October.

“There are certainly security aspects of their return, it cannot be perceived as if just some women and children should be returned to Bosnia from somewhere,” Security Minister Dragan Mektic told Reuters.

Mektic said Bosnia was obliged to accept the women who held its citizenship but not their children who were never registered as Bosnian citizens, adding also that it could not be determined with certainty if their warrior husbands were really killed.

And even if they return, they are set to face a difficult process of re-socialisation and reintegration in a country where programmes to address such problems do not exist, warned Vlado Azinovic, an expert on terrorism and lecturer at the Sarajevo University School for Political Sciences.

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Categories: Bosnian Women, children, Islamic State, News, Syria

Extremism – Italy: Islamic State fighter wants to return to Italy, warns of ‘sleeper cells’

March 11, 2019 Article

An Islamic State fighter detained in Syria urged Italy on Saturday to let him come home to start a new life, saying he had abandoned the self-styled jihadist “caliphate” after growing disillusioned with its rulers.

Mounsef al-Mkhayar, a 22-year-old of Moroccan descent who grew up in Italy, spoke to Reuters in his first interview since surrendering to the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) two months ago.

He has been in prison since emerging from Baghouz, a tiny village in eastern Syria where the SDF is poised to wipe out the last vestige of Islamic State rule – which once spanned a third of Iraq and Syria.

Mkhayar gave an account of growing chaos among jihadists on the brink of defeat, and of disputes in the ranks as top commanders fled Syria.

But he said Islamic State was also planning for the next phase, smuggling out hundreds of men to set up sleeper cells across Iraq and eastern Syria: “They said ‘We must get revenge.’”

Mkhayar is one of thousands from all over the world who were drawn to the promise of an ultra-radical Sunni Islamist utopia overriding national borders. Kurdish security officials identified him as Italian, and he said he holds Italian citizenship.

“I wish to return to Italy to my family and friends … for them to accept and help me to live a new life,” said Mkhayar, who walks on crutches after shelling injured his leg. “I just want to get out of this movie, I’m tired.”

FROM MILAN TO MAYADIN

Mkhayar was sentenced to eight years in jail by a Milan court in 2017 for spreading Islamic State propaganda and trying to recruit Italians to its cause, according to Italian media. As a result, he is likely to have to serve this sentence if he does return to Italy.

Reuters interviewed him at a security office in northern Syria in the presence of an SDF official.

As it nears victory, the SDF has struggled with the dilemma of holding fighters who travelled from abroad to join Islamic State along with women and children.

Before the final assault on Baghouz, the Kurdish-led SDF said it had around 800 foreign militants in jails and 2,000 of their wives and children in camps. Since then, the numbers have ballooned.

The SDF wants them sent back where they came from. But foreign governments generally do not want to receive citizens who may be hard to prosecute, and who pledged allegiance to a caliphate that left behind of a trail of butchery.

Once an atheist with an affinity for rap music and a dream of moving to America, Mkhayar joined Islamic State at 18.

He said he had spent most of his life in Milan with an aunt he calls his mother, before being placed in a home for troubled youths overseen by an Italian priest. He spent a month in prison on drugs charges.

Then he began immersing himself in Islamic State videos on YouTube and speaking to recruiters on Facebook. It took him only a month to decide to move to Syria with a friend four years ago.

His friend was later killed on the battlefield. After military and religious training, Mkhayar fought on various fronts. As Islamic State lost its Syrian headquarters at Raqqa, he left for Mayadin on the Euphrates river in Syria, then moved further east across the desert, towards the Iraqi border.

“WE’RE GETTING OUT”

Amid a string of military defeats in eastern Syria, Islamic State leaders were in disarray, killing off rival clerics and commanders known as emirs, Mkhayar said.

He said he had tried to quit the fighting but had been imprisoned, and then dispatched back to the frontlines as attacks intensified.

He wound up in Baghouz, where he said the jihadists were split between wanting to give up or fight to the death.

Mkhayar said his wife, a Syrian Kurdish woman from Kobani whom he had married three years ago, helped convince him to leave.

“‘That’s it,’ we said, ‘we’re getting out.’ I saw my little daughter turning weak. I was scared my children would die.”

Mkhayar said he could not sleep thinking about his wife and two daughters in a camp for displaced people in another part of northeast Syria. His wife is due to give birth in a month.

He said he still believed in the idea of a caliphate for Muslims, but accused Islamic State rulers of governing their land like “a mafia”, seeking only to make money and violating their own rules with impunity.

Commanders had stolen money and fled to Turkey, Iraq or Western Europe while ordering people to stay and defend Islam, he said.

“This is my belief and I won’t change it, but here in Islamic State, in reality this doesn’t exist … There is no justice,” he said.

“Honestly, I came here too fast … When I arrived, I found another story.”

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Categories: Baghouz, Islamic State, Kurdish, Mayadin, Milan, Mkhayar, News

IS Brides: Two Belgian women, renouncing Islamic State, fear kids will never go home

March 10, 2019 Article

Two Belgian women who joined Islamic State in Syria said on Sunday they were losing hope they will ever go home after a Belgian court overturned a ruling to repatriate them with their six children.

Tatiana Wielandt and Bouchra Abouallal, each 26, said that as much as it pains them, they would send the children to Belgium for a better life and stay behind if it came to that.

“What do I wish to receive? A ticket home,” Abouallal said at the sprawling Ain Issa camp enclosed by wire fences in northern Syria. “I understand people are afraid … They are judging us but they don’t know us.”

European nations are wrestling with how to handle militants and their families seeking to return as Islamic State’s self-declared caliphate crumbles.

The prospect of repatriation has sparked a fierce public debate in Brussels and other European capitals, where there is little sympathy for the families of jihadists with the trauma of attacks still fresh. Few governments want to take back their citizens, who may be hard to prosecute.

Last year, a judge ordered Belgium to return the two women and the children they had with militants. But the state fought the case, fearing it would set a precedent, and won an appeal in February.

“These children can’t live. They have no education. They have nothing,” Wielandt told Reuters in the women’s first interview since the Belgian state won the appeal. Her youngest son, blond and barefoot, clung to her clothes.

The government sought to make a distinction between the mothers – sisters-in-law who were convicted in absentia of being Islamic State militants – and the children who officials say cannot be guilty of their parent’s actions.

Like other parents across Europe, the grandmother of the six children, aged from 10 months to seven years, has tried to bring them back for over a year.

Belgium says it will stick by a 2017 decision to allow back all children under 10 from Iraq and Syria, but it is no longer under pressure from its judiciary to act in the case of the six.

U.S.-backed forces in Syria, holding thousands of foreign jihadists along with their wives and children, say they cannot keep them forever.

HOUSE FULL OF TOYS

Wielandt and her school friend said they turned against Islamic State as they saw its militants brutally murder people, including foreigners who had joined its cause.

They got smuggled out of Islamic State territory and surrendered to the Kurdish forces in Ain Issa in late 2017 after the jihadists lost their base in Syria’s Raqqa city, where they lived. They said they spent two months in prison before being sent to a camp in the northeast.

The sisters-in-law are among 17 Belgian women and 32 children in Syria, security sources say.

Wielandt converted to Islam to marry Abouallal’s brother when they were still teens. Soon after, they left with their husbands for Syria – each with a baby – like more than 400 Belgians who headed to the conflict zone.

Their husbands died within a year. Each pregnant with a second child, the two widows returned to Belgium in 2014.

When Abouallal’s mother, Fatiha, was away on vacation a few months later, they fled again – leaving her heartbroken with an empty house full of toys near Antwerp.

Abouallal said they went to Syria in 2015 after feeling under “pressure” when police questioned them in Belgium or people blamed them for Islamic State attacks in Europe.

“I was thinking I’m going to live my whole life like this,” she added. “And we still had a little bit this ideology.”

“I NEED TO GET PUNISHED”

The second time they joined Islamic State, both married again and had children: Wielandt to a Dutch militant, who was killed, and Abouallal to a man from Trinidad, who surrendered with them.

The sisters-in-law said they stood ready to face jail time and get help. Abouallal said she burst into tears the last time she heard a plane flying overhead.

“I don’t even fight this. I made a mistake and I need to get punished for it,” she added. “If I ever go back to Belgium, I hope they give me an injection or whatever to forget this whole part of our lives.”

Nearly a month ago, they were moved to the Ain Issa camp, where the children live among scores of tarpaulin tents in the dirt.

They said they received threats from more extremist women for showing their faces or not wearing black.

“I don’t have a lot of hope anymore,” Abouallal said, her eyes filling with tears. “I know my mother did everything for us after everything we did to her.”

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Categories: Ain Issa, Bouchra Aboualla, IS Brides, News, Tatiana Wielandt

Extremism-U.K: Pawel Golaszewski, from Leeds, Facing Six Counts Under the Terrorism Act

March 9, 2019 Article

A man accused of possessing instruction manuals on making weaponry and killing techniques has appeared in court.

Pawel Golaszewski, 33, from Leeds, faces six counts under the Terrorism Act.

He is charged with possession of a document or record containing information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism.

The charges allege that, on February 23 in Leeds, Golaszewski had copies of 21 Silent Techniques Of Killing by Master Hei Long, The Anarchist Cookbook and The Big Book Of Mischief.

It is also alleged he had in his possession the Improvised Munitions Handbook, Murder Inc, The Book by Jack The Rippa, and Minimanual Of The Urban Guerilla by Carlos Marighella.

Golaszewski appeared in the dock at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on Saturday wearing glasses and a grey jumper and tracksuit bottoms.

Assisted by an interpreter, he spoke only to confirm his name, date of birth, address and that his nationality is Polish.

Golaszewski’s lawyer, Frances Hertzog, indicated not-guilty pleas on his behalf and made no application for bail.

He was remanded in custody to appear at the Old Bailey on March 15.

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Categories: Anarchist Cookbook, News, Pawel Golaszewski, Polish Extremism, Terrorism Act