A dental student who amassed and disseminated a “breathtaking” amount of terrorist-related material has been jailed for eight years.

Abdurahman Kaabar also sent hundreds of pounds to his brother, Mohammed Kaabar, who was fighting for Jihadists in Syria, Sheffield Crown Court heard.

Jailing Kaabar, 24, on Friday, Judge Paul Watson QC said: “It was clear that you had wed yourself to a corrupt and corrosive ideology of Islamic extremism. The volume of material which you downloaded and kept in your possession was frankly breathtaking and the content of which was horrific.”

The judge said he was confident the material distributed by Kaabar was “intended to encourage others to engage in terrorist activities”.

He said one of those in contact with the defendant was Mohammed Awan, another dentistry student whom he jailed for 10 years in 2017 for preparing acts of terrorism.

Judge Watson said Kaabar had been found with documents which gave instructions for knife attacks and bomb making as well one which glorified the Orlando nightclub attack in June 12016, which left 49 people dead.

Kabaar, of Martin Street, Upperthorpe, Sheffield, pleaded guilty last year to 15 offences relating to disseminating or possessing material likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism.

He was found guilty by jury of two counts of terrorist fundraising relating to cash sent to his brother in Syria.

The former Plymouth university student told the jury last year that the cash was for medical treatments.

Another defendant – Badroddin Kazkaz, 23, of Cross Myrtle Road, Heeley, Sheffield – pleaded guilty to a similar terrorism funding offence. He was jailed for four years on Friday. Judge Watson said Mohammed Kaabar, who travelled to Syria in 2016, was “engaged in violent Jihadi activity”.

The judge it was not clear which group Kaabar was fighting with, but it did not matter.

He said the cash sent abroad was to be used “for a terrorist purpose”.

Judge Watson told Kazkaz: “I’m not sentencing you for the views that you had or even may continue to have.

“The privilege that you enjoy of living in a democratic society, based on democratically passed laws and conventions, is to hold such views.”

But he said that privilege ended when someone engaged in acts supportive of terrorism “designed to undermine those very privileges”.

Detective Chief Superintendent Martin Snowden, head of counter-terrorism policing North East, said: “Kaabar had a radical mindset and an active interest in extremism. He was not only in possession of terrorist material, he was also sharing it and encouraging others to carry out terrorist activity.

“Kabaar and Kazkaz both transferred money to Kabaar’s brother, believed to be fighting in Syria. It is highly likely that they would have at least suspected that the money would be used to further the cause of terrorist groups and potentially fund terrorist activity.

“Showing support and providing funds to these types of groups allows terrorism to survive.”

French counter-terrorism investigators questioned five people on Tuesday after police over the weekend found what appeared to be a ready-to-detonate bomb at an apartment building in one of Paris’s poshest neighbourhoods.

Interior Minister Gerard Collomb said one of those arrested was on an intelligence services list of “radicalised” persons – a list that includes the names of potential Islamist militants.

“We are still in a state of war,” Collomb, speaking after a Sunday attack in which a knifeman killed two women in Marseille, told France Inter radio.

Judicial sources said the explosive device included two gas canisters inside the building in the affluent 16th district of western Paris and two outside, some of them doused with petrol and wired to connect to a mobile phone.

It was unclear why the device was planted at the location where it was found as there was no obvious target living there, the judicial sources said.

More than 230 people have been killed in France in attacks by Islamist militants over the past three years. The Islamic State militant group, whose bases in Syria and Iraq are being bombed by French war planes, has urged followers to attack France.

Most of those killed died in attacks by Islamist gunmen and suicide bombers in Paris in 2015 and when a man drove a large truck into crowds in the Riviera resort of Nice in 2016.

Since then, there has been a string of attacks perpetrated by lone assailants, often targeting police or soldiers.

“The threat is changing form,” said Collomb.

A counter-terrorism investigation is also under way after the attack on Sunday, where a knifeman slit the throat of one of his victims and killed her cousin before being shot dead by soldiers at a train station in the southern port city.

A separate inquiry has been opened to establish why the man, who had been briefly detained by police the day before in the city of Lyon had been released.

France declared a state of emergency in late 2015 after the Paris attack by gunmen and suicide bombers, giving police special search and arrest powers to combat would-be terrorists.

New legislation was due to be put to a vote in parliament on Tuesday to make many of those emergency measures permanent.

“My dear family, please forgive me,” reads the handwritten letter discarded in the dusty halls of an Islamic State training compound in eastern Mosul.

“Don’t be sad and don’t wear the black clothes (of mourning). I asked to get married and you did not marry me off. So, by God, I will marry the 72 virgins in paradise.”

They were schoolboy Alaa Abd al-Akeedi’s parting words before he set off from the compound to end his life in a suicide bomb attack against Iraqi security forces last year.

The letter was written on an Islamic State form marked “Soldiers’ Department, Martyrs’ Brigade” and in an envelope addressed to his parents’ home in western Mosul.

Akeedi, aged 15 or 16 when he signed up, was one of dozens of young recruits who passed through the training facility in the past 2-1/2 years as they prepared to wage jihad. In several cases this involved carrying out suicide attacks – Islamic State’s most effective weapon against a U.S.-backed military campaign to retake the group’s last major urban bastion in Iraq.

His letter never reached his family. It was left behind with a handful of other bombers’ notes to relatives when Islamic State abandoned the facility in the face of an army offensive that has reclaimed more than half of the city since October.

The militants also left a handwritten registry containing the personal details of about 50 recruits. Not all entries had years of birth, and only about a dozen had photographs attached, but many recruits were in their teens or early 20s.

These documents, found by Reuters on a trip into eastern Mosul after the army recaptured that area, include some of the first first-hand accounts from Islamic State’s suicide bombers to be made public and offer an insight into the mindset of young recruits prepared to die for Islamic State’s ultra-hardline ideology.

Reuters interviewed relatives of three of the fighters including Akeedi to help determine where they came from and why they chose jihad. In rare testimonies by families of Islamic State suicide bombers, they told of teenagers who joined the jihadists to their dismay and bewilderment, and died within months.

Reuters could not independently verify the information about other recruits in the registry. Islamic State does not make itself available to independent media outlets so could not be contacted for comment on the letters, the registry or the phenomenon of teenage suicide bombers.

‘BROTHER JIHADI, RESPECT QUIET’

Islamic State has attracted thousands of young recruits in Mosul – by far the biggest city in the caliphate it declared in 2014 over territory it seized in Iraq and Syria. The group has carried out hundreds of suicide attacks in the Middle East and plotted or inspired dozens of attacks in the West.

The training compound visited by Reuters consisted of three villas confiscated from Mosul residents. Man-sized holes knocked through exterior walls allowed easy access between the villas.

Lower floors were littered with IS posters and pamphlets on topics ranging from religion to weaponry, as well as tests on warfare and the Koran. Green paint and bed sheets on the windows obscured the view from outside and gave the rooms an eerie glow.

Flak jackets and body-shaped shooting targets filled one room, while medicines and syringes were scattered around another that appeared to have served as a clinic.

The rooms upstairs were packed full of bunk beds with space for almost 100 people. Printed signs outlined strict house rules. One ordered: “Brother jihadi, respect quiet and cleanliness”.

PLEDGING ALLEGIANCE

Most of the recruits listed in the registry were Iraqi but there were a few from the United States, Iran, Morocco and India. Akeedi’s entry says he pledged allegiance on Dec. 1, 2014, a few months after the jihadists seized Mosul.

A relative told Reuters by phone that Akeedi’s father was deeply distressed by his son’s decision but feared punishment if he tried to remove him from Islamic State’s ranks. Reuters was unable to contact his father.

Akeedi rarely visited his family after joining the jihadists. On his last trip home he told his father he was going to carry out a suicide attack in Baiji, an oil refinery town south of Mosul where the militants had been fighting off repeated offensives by the Iraqi military.

“He told his father, ‘I am going to seek martyrdom,'” said the relative, who declined to be named because he feared reprisals from Islamic State or from Iraqi forces preparing to storm the area.

A few months later, Akeedi’s family was told by the militants that he had succeeded.

Another recruit of the same age, Atheer Ali, is listed in the registry beside a passport-sized photo showing a boy with bushy eyebrows and large brown eyes. He wears a dark collar-less tunic, a brown head covering and a cautious smile.

His father, Abu Amir, told Reuters his son had been an outstanding student who excelled in science and was always watching the National Geographic TV channel. He loved to swim and fish in a nearby river and would help out on his uncle’s vegetable farm after school.

TOO YOUNG FOR FACIAL HAIR

Ali was shy and slim, lacking a fighter’s mentality or build, Abu Amir said in an interview at his eastern Mosul home, sifting through family photos.

So the father was horrified when one day in early 2015 Ali didn’t come home from school but ran off with seven classmates to join Islamic State.

When Abu Amir went to the militants’ offices across the city to track down his son, they threatened to jail him.

He never saw his son alive again.

A few months later, three Islamic State fighters pulled up at Abu Amir’s house in a pickup truck and handed him a scrap of paper with his son’s name on it. He was dead.

Abu Amir retrieved Ali’s body from the morgue. His hair had grown long but he was still too young for facial hair. Shrapnel was lodged in his arms and chest.

He said the fighters told him he had been hit by an air strike on a mortar position in Bashiqa, northeast of Mosul. They described him as a “hero”.

Gathered in the family sitting room, Ali’s relatives said he was brainwashed. Many of his school friends fled Mosul after the militants took control and Ali fell in with a new crowd, but his family never noticed a change in his behaviour.

“Even now I’m still astounded. I don’t know how they convinced him to join,” said Abu Amir. “I’m just glad we could bury him and put this whole thing to rest.”

‘HIS MIND WAS FRAGILE’

Sheet Omar was also 15 or 16 years old when he joined Islamic State in August 2014, weeks after the group captured Mosul. Next to his registry entry is the fatal addendum: “Conducted martyrdom operation”.

Shalal Younis, Omar’s sister’s father-in-law, confirmed he had died carrying out a suicide attack, though he was uncertain about the details.

He said the teenager, from the Intisar district of eastern Mosul, had been overweight and insecure and joined the jihadists after his father’s death.

“His mind was fragile and they took advantage of that, promising him virgins and lecturing him about being a good Muslim,” said Younis. “If someone had tempted him with drugs and alcohol, he probably would have done that instead.”

A delivery driver who plotted to kill U.S. troops based in England by staging road accidents to lure soldiers from their cars and then attack them with knives and possibly a home-made bomb was jailed for life on Friday.

In a message to a suspected accomplice in Syria, Junead Khan, 25, a supporter of the Islamic State (IS) militant group, told how he had missed an opportunity to kill Americans on his rounds in Bedfordshire, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire in central and eastern England.

“When I saw these U.S. soldiers on the road it just looked simple but I had nothing on me or would’ve got into an accident with them and made them get out the car,” he wrote.

In sentencing at London’s Kingston Crown Court, Khan, who was convicted last month of preparing terrorist acts and planning to fight with IS in Syria, was jailed for life and told he would serve at least 12 years in prison.

His uncle Shazib Khan, 23, who was also found guilty of planning to join IS, was given a 13-year jail term.

Police said they had recovered British and U.S. flags stolen from a diner near Junead Khan’s home in Luton, north of London, which they believe were potentially to be used for a symbolic act during the attack.

“Junead Khan’s ambition was to attack an innocent U.S. soldier on our streets. He sought inspiration from terrorist videos, bomb-making guides and contacts in Syria,” said Commander Dean Haydon, head of London police’s Counter Terrorism Command.

For Mucahit Bilici, comedy offers the means to invert the distorting power of stereotypes. This is true for anyone who has experienced racism and Islamophobia.

This inversion reflects a recent Twitter trend that ridiculed the Sun’s claim that one in five Muslims has ‘sympathy for jihadis’. The hashtag #1in5Muslims also created a wider discussion about Islamophobia.

The polling company behind the Sun poll, Survation, faced criticisms for its methodological approach. It told the Guardian that it picked “1,500 Muslim surnames” from its database. Telephone interviews did not proceed until the individuals identified confirmed an Islamic belief.

Monday’s edition of the Sun had claimed that this sympathy extended to ISIS. But the poll did specify any group. It rather sought, in a simplistic and vague manner, to gauge ‘sympathy’ with Muslims who had joined fighters in Syria. Fighters could extend to other groups including anti-Assad forces and Kurdish groups.

The Sun’s political editor Tom Newton-Dunn wrote “if the poll reflected views across the country it would mean 500,000 have some support for jihadis“. To extend that logic, a Survation poll in March for Sky News asked the same question to non-Muslims. It found that 14 per cent had expressed ‘sympathy’. If that poll reflected national opinion it would mean that 8.47m ‘have some support for jihadis’.

Survation have distanced themselves from the Sun’s interpretation of their data.

As Maria Sobolewska notes, the language of polling is important. There’s a fundamental difference between emotional sympathy and ideological endorsement. That way, the bar becomes so low it renders it an almost pointless measure of opinion. What that sympathy means remains open to interpretation. This interpretative framework allowed the Sun’s Kelvin MacKenzie to write “Sympathy for firing a machine gun at point-blank range at unarmed innocent young people on a night out enjoying a band or a bite to eat?“

MacKenzie then attempted to justify the rejection of refugees fleeing the competing totalitarian terrors of ISIS and Assad.  He used the poll data to justify rejecting any person from Turkey. That bizarre logic almost enters the realm of the paranoia around the conspiracy of Islamisation.

This framework also applies to the ComRes poll after the first Paris atrocities at the start of 2015. It found that 27 per cent of British Muslims ‘have some sympathy for the motives behind the attacks on Charlie Hebdo in Paris’.  And the same problem emerged. Nigel Farage cited this information in a wider attack on British Muslim communities. The Ukip leader again reinforced the idea of a ‘fifth column’. This vague wording allows for a variety of interpretations. Even when 68 per cent of Muslims in the same poll rejected violence in the name of blasphemy. Even when 78 per cent found the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed deeply offensive.  Of the 1,000 British Muslims polled 94 per cent would report another Muslim to the police if they planned acts of violence.

Without a comparative poll the vague framework allows individuals to believe the best and worst of British Muslims. Some do justify violence. A great majority do not. Opinion polls have value when done right. And the above  have shown some obvious flaws. For the Sun newspaper, however, this front page has registered record complaints to press regulator Ipso.

The post Why more than #1in5Muslims ridiculed the Sun’s ‘jihadi sympathy’ story appeared first on Religious Reader.