For western countries, the danger of treating people like suspects is that in can increase the likelihood of people getting fed up and becoming what you were trying to prevent.

Who knows this story could be BS, or he coulda radicalized anyways-- but I think if past transgressions to people of color were made in today's social media/globalization age, we may have fought back in similar ways.



He was raised in a middle­class neighborhood in London and on occasion prayed at a
mosque in Greenwich.

The friends, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the
investigation, believe that Emwazi started to radicalize after a planned safari in Tanzania
following his graduation from the University of Westminster.

Emwazi and two friends — a German convert to Islam named Omar and another man,
Abu Talib — never made it on the trip. Once they landed in Dar es Salaam, in May 2009,
they were detained by police and held overnight. It’s unclear whether the reason for the
detention was made clear to the three, but they were eventually deported.
Emwazi flew to Amsterdam, where he claimed that an officer from MI5, Britain’s domestic
security agency, accused him of trying to reach Somalia, where the militant group alShabab
operates in the southern part of the country, according to e­mails that he sent to
Qureshi and that were provided to The Post.


Emwazi denied the accusation and claimed that MI5 representatives had tried to recruit
him. But a former hostage said Jihadi John was obsessed with Somalia and made his
captives watch videos about al­Shabab, which is allied with al­Qaeda.
The episode was described in the Independent, a British newspaper, which identifiedEmwazi as Muhammad ibn Muazzam.

Emwazi and his friends were allowed to return to Britain, where he met with Qureshi in
the fall of 2009 to discuss what had happened. “Mohammed was quite incensed by his
treatment, that he had been very unfairly treated,” Qureshi said.
Shortly afterward, Emwazi decided to move to his birthplace, Kuwait, where he landed a
job working for a computer company, according to the e­mails he wrote to Qureshi. He
came back to London twice, the second time to finalize his wedding plans to a woman in
Kuwait.

In June 2010, however, counterterrorism officials in Britain detained him again — this
time fingerprinting him and searching his belongings. When he tried to fly back to Kuwait
the next day, he was prevented from doing so.

“I had a job waiting for me and marriage to get started,” he wrote in a June 2010 e­mail to
Qureshi. But now “I feel like a prisoner, only not in a cage, in London. A person
imprisoned & controlled by security service men, stopping me from living my new life in
my birthplace & country, Kuwait.”

Nearly four months later, when a court in New York sentenced Aafia Siddiqui, an alQaeda
operative convicted for the attempted murder of U.S. personnel in Afghanistan,
Emwazi expressed sympathy for her, saying he had “heard the upsetting news regarding
our sister. . . . This should only keep us firmer towards fighting for freedom and justice!!!”
In the interview, Qureshi said he last heard from Emwazi in January 2012, when Emwazi
sent him an e­mail seeking advice.

“This is a young man who was ready to exhaust every single kind of avenue within themachinery of the state to bring a change for his personal situation,” Qureshi said. In the
end, he felt “actions were taken to criminalize him and he had no way to do something
against these actions.”

Close friends of Emwazi’s also said his situation in London had made him desperate to
leave the country. It’s unclear exactly when he reached Syria or how.
One friend said he believed Emwazi wanted to travel to Saudi Arabia to teach English in
2012 but was unsuccessful. Soon afterward, the friend said, he was gone.
“He was upset and wanted to start a life elsewhere,” one of the friends said. “He at some
stage reached the point where he was really just trying to find another way to get out.”
Once in Syria, Emwazi contacted his family and at least one of his friends. It’s unclear
what he told them about his activities there.

A former hostage who was debriefed by officials upon release said that Jihadi John was
part of a team guarding Western captives at a prison in Idlib, Syria, in 2013. The hostages
nicknamed the facility “the box.” Emwazi was joined by two other men with British
accents, including one who was dubbed “George.” A former hostage said Emwazi
participated in the waterboarding of four Western hostages.


Former hostages described George as the leader of the trio. Jihadi John, they said, was
quiet and intelligent. “He was the most deliberate,” a former hostage said.
Beginning in early 2014, the hostages were moved to a prison in the Syrian city of Raqqa,
the Islamic State’s de facto capital, where they were visited often by the trio. They appeared to have taken on more powerful roles within the Islamic State.
About the same time, Qureshi said, he sent an e­mail to Emwazi.
“I was wondering if you could send me your number,” he wrote. “Inshallah it
will be good to catch up.”
There was no respons