For a brief period the black banner of the extremist jihadists in Syria and Iraq hung on the gates of a housing estate in Poplar, east London, which has Britain's highest concentration of Muslims. Local residents claimed the flag was raised in solidarity with the people of Gaza. Many people in Britain saw it as an alarming sign of support for ISIL.
Such a flag, in the shadow of the Canary Wharf financial district, added to a political panic gripping Britain – and much of Western Europe as well – over the potential terrorist threat posed by young Muslim men who volunteer to fight in Syria and Iraq.
An estimated 2,000 Europeans, including 500 from Britain, are believed to have volunteered for jihad in Syria and Iraq. A hunt is on to identify a British man who fronted the two videos announcing the deaths of the American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff and promised to execute a British aid worker. He speaks with what is called a London multicultural accent, which is influenced by Caribbean, South Asian and African speech and by rap music.
The British papers call this masked man “Jihadi John”. Clearly he has been chosen by ISIL propagandists to instil fear in the hearts of the Americans and British. But is he a significant figure in ISIL, or just an actor dupe? Whatever the answer, the question of why British Muslims volunteer for jihad has risen to the top of the political agenda, with the prospect that Britain may join the international coalition called for by president Barack Obama to destroy ISIL.
David Cameron, the British prime minister, blames the “poisonous narrative of Islamism” but this hardly explains the diversity of motives and backgrounds of the recruits who go to Syria.
Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, a British-Egyptian former rap artist who appeared on social media holding a severed head in Syria, comes from a smart part of London. His conversion to jihad was apparently prompted by his father being extradited from Britain to the US on terrorism charges.
Others are happy to abandon their studies just for the adventure of joining the world's meanest gang and holding a gun. Two school friends, Yusuf Sarwar and Mohammed Ahmed, set off to Syria with so little knowledge of their religion that they bought The Quran for Dummies and Islam for Dummies. Muhammad Hamidur Rahman was a store supervisor for Primark, the discount clothing chain, before he set off for Syria, where he has apparently died.
Even more surprising is the 20-year-old privately educated Scottish student, Aqsa Mahmood, who aspired to be a pharmacist. Last year she abandoned her studies and fled to Syria where she has married a jihadist and tweets of her humdrum domestic life while calling for terror attacks on British soil.
Adding further complication is the lack of any single centre of recruitment which can be pinpointed geographically and monitored. These young people are recruited by social media or through Skype calls to distant people they never see face to face. All this makes simple answers to the problem difficult.
One person who has a worm’s eye view of the problem is the frail 77-year-old woman who took down the black flag from the entrance to the Poplar housing estate. Sister Christine Frost, a Roman Catholic nun, has been a community activist there for the past 40 years, offering help to people of all races and religions, including the dominant Bangladeshi community.
Her thoughts on the rising jihadist sympathies in this part of east London are surprising.
Muslim communities in London, she says, have a sense of isolation from British society, which has grown since the US-led invasion of Iraq, and is exacerbated by lack of housing. They feel they are being “socially cleansed” to make way for the wealthy who profit from London’s reincarnation as the capital of the world. The rich/poor division in east London will lead to a “Bosnia/Serbia situation” she told the Spectator magazine.
It is certainly true that the view of London from Poplar is not encouraging. New houses are being built all around, but they are for the lawyers and accountants who work in Canary Wharf. Some Bangladeshi families are living one family to a room, and could never afford to buy a place in the new builds.
Critics of this explanation point out that jihadist volunteers are usually not from poor backgrounds and often have higher education. Muslims are not the only victims of social cleansing in London. The white working class that used to live in the East End have decamped to the suburbs to find places to live, blaming not the new rich but African and Asian immigrant communities. Despair about career prospects and housing are not confined to Muslim communities: downwards pressure on wages and rising inequality mean that the less educated young people will struggle to match the living standard of their parents. Alcohol and drugs, the standard palliatives in British society, are not so widely used in Muslim communities.
Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, recognises that there is more than propaganda involved in driving British Muslims to fight in the Middle East. They go because they feel they are “called”, he has said. It gives them a sense of “value and purpose in life”.
That hardly gives the government a clear steer on what to do. But it is evident that the call of jihad resonates with many of the anxieties felt by young people, and second generation immigrants in particular – from conflicted identities and spiritual confusion to thwarted ambition and resentment at declining economic prospects. An antiterrorism strategy can only be a small part of the response.
Public opinion in Britain is not in favour of returning to Iraq to join in what looks like an air war against ISIL. But that may change under US pressure and if a British hostage is beheaded. The repercussions at home of such action abroad can still only be guessed.
Alan Philps is a commentator on global affairs
On Twitter @aphilps
