Mr. Adnan Saif: A Brummie who Liaisons with al-Qaeda?*

One would need to circle in an orbit of uncategorised naivety not to acknowledge that in England’s major cities are undeclared pockets whereby one can nonchalantly encounter supporters and followers of Islamism whether in its Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda or ISIS manifestation. And the British state is far from innocent in allowing this state of affairs to develop. Indeed, one can only marvel on how the UK state allowed Libyan jihadis, originally veterans from the Afghan jihad in the 1980s, to settle in Manchester from the early 1990s.  

Birmingham, it seems, is no different to any other city. Continue reading

The Rise of North Yemeni Islamism in Birmingham, UK.

One of the reasons generally given for the rise of extreme Islamism is the Arab defeat at the hands of Israel in 1967 in the six day war.

It is theorised that, from this defeat (or Naksa as the Arabs refer to it), loomed the beginning of the end of Arab Nationalism and other, largely secular ideologies, which had hitherto led the struggle to liberate the Middle East from western domination and zionist colonialism. This defeat created the vacuum political Islamism has supposedly filled since.

This theory tends to be strongly insinuated at and espoused by British writers such as Seamus Milne, Jason Burke and the late Chris Harman.[1]

The theory overlooks one very important British initiated strategy[2] played out in the Middle East and South East Asia during the Cold War. Continue reading