Thames House, the HQ of MI5

The Pamela Geller site is reporting a story, originally carried by the BBC, on just how many Jihadis of British origin are fighting in Syria.  The report stated that there was 200 known British origin Jihadis along with Jihadis from other European nations.

The BBC said:

“The number of British Islamists who have gone to Syria to fight in the war there is in the “low hundreds”, a senior UK intelligence official says.

Andrew Parker, head of domestic intelligence service MI5, told a parliamentary hearing the conflict was attracting al-Qaeda UK sympathisers.

Their interaction with militant groups abroad was a “very important strand of the threat” the UK faced, he said.

One in 10 foreign militants in Syria is believed to be from Europe”

‘Low hundreds’ is not something that we should fail to worry about, and neither should our security services or our politicians.  Mr Parker is correct, such Jihadis are a threat to the UK, and trained, motivated, armed jihadis who hate this country, are not something that we should brush under the carpet.  However what is also a threat to the UK are those Islamic communities who shelter, either deliberately or by omission, those fighting Jihad.  Sparkbrook Birmingham for example has been referred to here before as ‘jihadi central.’  Attitudes in these places also need to be tackled.  Also these figures are only the Jihadi fighters that MI5 know about.  These figures sound like estimates and may well not reflect the actual situation.  It may be good to treat Mr Parker’s figure as not written in stone and the figure for these fighters could very well be much higher.

The BBC added:

“Last month, BBC News learnt that a group of 20 young men from the UK were fighting against forces allied to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on the Turkish border.

According to the Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King’s College London, most British jihadists are in their 20s, university-educated and Muslims of British Pakistani origin.

Up to 20 people from Britain’s Sudanese community and several ethnic Syrians from the UK have also gone to fight in Syria.”

Those going out to fight Jihad are not romantic ‘International Brigade’ type freedom fighters of myth and legend, but are fighting to impose on Syria a brutal Islamic Shariah based regime, under which freedom of all sorts will quickly wither and die. This is what they, the Jihadis,want for Syria, this is what they want  for the UK, this is what they want for all of us who do not subscribe to their twisted and obscene views.

We should be seriously and rightly worried about the sheer scale of British Islamic involvement in the jihadist movements in Syria.