By Kyle Smith
Tuesday, July 30, 2019
On August 19, 2014, a masked man with a London accent
appeared on a video, boasting that he was a soldier for ISIS, and proceeded to
behead American journalist James Foley. Security services almost immediately
identified the murderer as Mohammed Emwazi, a Kuwait-born British man of 26.
His captives, noticing the British accents with which he and three other
captors spoke, referred to the four as John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Emwazi’s media
nickname became “Jihadi John.”
Built around interviews with MI5 and CIA officials,
leading soldiers such as General David Richards of the U.K. and General David
Petraeus of the U.S., and survivors of Syrian hostage camps from the era,
director Anthony Wonke’s penetrating HBO documentary Unmasking Jihadi John:
Anatomy of a Terrorist makes unfortunate, distracting use of cheesy
dramatic reenactments in telling this awful story. But it also raises important
questions about Emwazi’s journey to terrorism. The documentary is tinged with a
sense of regret that the spooks could have done more to give Emwazi an exit
ramp from evil.
As a boy, Emwazi immigrated to England at age six, his
family winning asylum because they had been, in Kuwait, members of a persecuted
minority, the Bedoon. Emwazi attended a Church of England school in London and
seemed well-adjusted. As an adolescent, he began to disengage, to seem
“slightly strange” in the words of one of his teachers. Footage of his youth
shows him constantly covering his mouth; apparently the other boys liked to
tease him about his breath. As a teen, he took up drinking and marijuana, but
in college he started adopting Islamic dress and habits. Such faith “gives
structure where there was none,” says one observer interviewed in the doc.
Online jihadist recruitment tools began to catch Emwazi’s
eye, and he went to Somalia and Tanzania for indoctrination in Islamism. In the
latter country he was locked up, beaten, and questioned. On the way back to
London, he was stopped again in Amsterdam and again in Dover. British spies
tried to steer him to be a double agent and threatened to make life difficult
for him if he didn’t cooperate. “Whether we contributed to his further
radicalization . . . by stopping him from travel is an interesting question,”
notes Commander Richard Walton, Scotland Yard head of counterterrorism.
Security agents may well have acted in a
counterproductive way. An engagement to a girl in London ended when the
agencies contacted the bride-to-be’s family and told them about Emwazi’s activities.
Emwazi’s own family hoped to steer him away from extremism by sending him to
Kuwait, where he got engaged again. But again, agents from the intelligence
services contacted the bride-to-be’s family and scared them off. A happily
married Emwazi might have been less dangerous, and his fury only grew as he
found it increasingly challenging to live in either the U.K. or Kuwait. He was
drawn to ISIS in Syria, where he eventually started a family, apparently with a
bride ISIS provided him.
In Syria, Emwazi starred in several gruesome 2014
execution videos involving beheadings that stunned the world with their
viciousness. “They were very, very skillful propaganda. They recreated the
medieval barbarity of the seventh century with these great bladed weapons,”
says Lord David Anderson, an independent reviewer of terrorism legislation. The
most breathtaking point reached by ISIS was perhaps when its terrorists burned
a Jordanian pilot alive in 2015, given that execution by fire is strictly
forbidden to Muslims.
Emwazi was a trained IT expert, and was clever about
hiding his tracks when he engaged in online activities, frustrating the experts
on his tail. All the same, he couldn’t hide forever. His days were numbered
when he started posting those horrific videos. “For us this was as personal as
if he’d have been an American,” says Douglas H. Wise, a leader for Middle East
operations for the CIA. “What we needed to do was find, fix, and finish
Emwazi.”
“As they say in the manhunt business,” Emwazi “ended up
on the X” is how Petraeus puts it. The mission to exterminate Emwazi became an
American priority, and the story of that manhunt is dramatically and
satisfyingly retold as the climax of Unmasking Jihadi John. The military
watched him for some time from above as he traveled to a marketplace, unaware
he was in the X. The executioner got what he denied his victims: an
instantaneous death. “He didn’t have to feel the cut of the steel,” says Wise.
“We’re going to have to live with a level of extreme
Islamist violence for some time to come,” says an expert in the film. But the
price of ISIS’s actions has become ever clearer, and today the group is
clinging to life. “Paul,” “George,” and “Ringo” have all been captured. May
anyone thinking of emulating Jihadi John consider his fate as seen in this
gripping film.
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