Choudary and Yahya belong to the extremist Islamic group Al-Muhajiroun, and though they speak for only a tiny fraction of Britain's 2 million Muslims, their views received grim publicity last week with the news that three British-born Muslims had been killed in Kabul — allegedly in a U.S. bombing raid on a Taliban compound — after volunteering for the jihad.
The deaths of the three young men shocked their families. In Crawley, an industrial town 53 km south of London, the mother of Yasir Khan, 28, insisted her son had gone to Pakistan for humanitarian work. In Luton, 55 km north of London, the parents of computer engineering student Afzal Munir and taxi driver Aftab Manzoor, both 25, weren't aware the two had joined up. Both lived with their parents in modest, semidetached suburban houses in this quiet town that is home to 22,000 Muslims.
At Luton's Central Mosque, the talk was all about the deaths of the two unassuming young men. Retired shopkeeper Muhammad Sulaiman, president of the mosque, disapproved of their act — "I live in Britain. If we fight, we fight for Britain" — and said that his religion insisted on permission from a man's wife or parents before joining a jihad. But younger men like taxi driver Shoked Malik, 29, reserved their criticism for the Americans: "They didn't bomb Northern Ireland over the terrorists there, so why Afghanistan?"
The idea of Britons fighting for the Taliban has hit a national nerve. Many Muslims in the U.K. are loudly anti-American and highly critical of the bombing in Afghanistan. In a poll of 500 London Muslims of Pakistani origin aged 20 to 45, the Asian radio station Sunrise found that 79% did not support Britain's participation in the war, 98% said they would not fight for the country, but 48% said they would take up arms for Islam.
Al-Muhajiroun is capitalizing on this anger. The organization's leaders claim it is not a recruiting agency, but they don't discourage anyone from joining the jihad. True Muslims "love death [for the cause] more than we love our life," says Yahya. The group had been saying for weeks that Britons were flocking to the bin Laden cause, much as Jewish youths went to Tel Aviv in 1967 to fight in the Arab-Israeli war. In Lahore last week a spokesman — British university graduate Abu Ibrahim — put the numbers at between 600 and 700. Few, however, believed such claims. British authorities speculated that volunteers probably amounted to a few dozen. Conservative peer Norman Tebbit suggested that it would be treason for British citizens to take up arms against Anglo-American forces. Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon warned that those who did fight for the Taliban might face prosecution should they return.