“Jihadi John” has been identified.
According to friends and others who know him, the masked man who has been featured in several videos by the Islamic State — including those with beheadings — is Mohammed Emwazi, a Kuwaiti-born Londoner from a well-to-do family who left for Syria around 2012 to join the Islamic State.
“I have no doubt that Mohammed is Jihadi John,” one of Emwazi’s close friends said in an interview with the Washington Post. “He was like a brother to me … I am sure it is him.”
Amim Qureshi, the research director for the human rights group CAGE, was in contact with Emwazi before he left for Syria and is certain he is “Jihadi John.”
Born in Kuwait and now in his mid-20s, Emwazi has very little presence on social media or online, which has made t it harder to identify and track him — until now. Friends say he was “polite” and “was mindful of making eye contact with women.” Raised in a middle-class neighborhood in West London, he occasionally prayed at a mosque in Greenwich.
Emwazi started to radicalize after a planned safari in Tanzania following his graduation from the University of Westminster, according to friends who spoke anonymously to the Washington Post. He and two friends were detained in Dar es Salaam on their way to the safari in May 2009 and eventually deported. When Emwazi flew to Amsterdam, he claimed that an officer from Britain’s domestic security agency MI5 accused him of trying to reach Somalia, where al-Shabab, a terrorist group allied with al Qaeda, is located.
Although he eventually denied the accusation, Enwazi was allegedly obsessed with Somalia and al-Shabab, a former hostage said. The Independent, a British newspaper, described the safari incident and identified him as Muhammad ibn Muazzam.
Emwasi was then allowed to return to Britain, where he eventually met with Qureshi, who he said was “quite incensed by his treatment.”
Shortly after, Emwazi moved to Kuwait to work for a computer company, according to emails he wrote to Qureshi. On his second trip back to London in June 2010 to finalize wedding plans with a woman in Kuwait, British counterterrorism officials detained him again and prevented him from flying back to Kuwait.
“I feel like a prisoner, only not in a cage, in London. A person imprisoned [and] controlled by security service men, stopping me from living my new life in my birthplace [and] country, Kuwait,” he said in an email to Qureshi.
The last time Qureshi heard from Emwazi was in January 2012, when he sent an email seeking advice.
According to friends, he became desperate to leave London. After an unsuccessful attempt to travel to Saudi Arabia to teach English in 2012, he disappeared soon after.
It is unclear when exactly he left for Syria, but once there, he contacted family and at least one of his friends — though what exactly he said exactly about his activities there is unknown.
Once part of the Islamic State, “Jihadi John” was part of a team guarding Western captives at a prison in Iblid, Syria, in 2012, a former hostage told officials upon release. Along with two other men with British accents, the trio was led by someone known as “George.” When the hostages were moved to a prison in the Syrian city of Raqqa in early 2014, the Islamic State’s de facto capital, the trio often visited, apparently having taken on a more powerful role within the terrorist group.
Since then, he has been seen in beheading videos dressed in all black, face covered — including that of James Foley, an American journalist killed last August.
“Our prime minister has been clear that we want all those who have committed murder on behalf of ISIL to face justice for the appalling acts carried out. There is an ongoing police investigation into the murder of hostages by ISIL in Syria. It is not appropriate for the government to comment on any part of it while this continues,” a spokeswoman for the British Embassy in Washington said.
U.S. officials declined to comment, as did Emwazi’s family, citing legal advice.
