LONDON
British fighters are being killed in Syria and Iraq at a rate of one every three weeks, latest research reveals.
To date 23 British fighters have been killed taking part in the conflict spreading across Syria and Iraq, King’s College London’s International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) reported on Friday.
The news comes after Mamanour Roshid, 24, was reportedly killed in Syria.
He had traveled from the U.K.'s port city of Portsmouth along with four others to join 23-year-old Ifthekar Jaman, who died last year.
The information was released by the academics in conjunction with the U.K. daily newspaper the Guardian, who also said 16 UK fighters have died since the start of 2014.
Muhammad Hamidur Rahman, 25, also from Portsmouth, was killed in July this year.
- Social media data
The Guardian said that the data had been collected via social media and sometimes from admissions from the families of the men.
The ICSR told the Guardian they only relied on reports from others in five cases in the conflict, without photos or “martyrdom” videos to log the death.
The ICSR said that in all the cases the academics had tracked social media accounts of the individual before they fell silent in the event of their deaths.
According to the Guardian, the 23 dead are second-generation immigrants of Libyan, Palestinian, Eritrean and Bangladeshi decent.
The average age was 23.5, said the ICSR.
- 'Good prospects'
The oldest of the men was 41, a father from Crawley, Abdul Waheed Majeed, who was killed when he blew himself up while driving a truck, during a prison break in February.
Abdullah Deghayes, and another man calling himself Abu Hamza Bengali, both from Brighton, were the youngest to have died, aged 18.
Three of the dead were from Portsmouth, two from Brighton and five from north and west London, said the Guardian.
ICSR’s Shiraz Maher told the Guardian that most of the British men who had been killed had “much better prospects than other jihadis from Europe known to have been killed”.
Maher told the Guardian: "These people come from every background imaginable but, when you compare Brits to other Europeans, it’s clear that those from this country tend to be better educated, more affluent, and have greater social mobility than their peers on the continent."
- Hundreds of fighters
"We think it’s incredibly likely that others have died that we’ve not heard of. In some of these cases, we found out by pure chance."
The ICSR said that, although the majority of British fighters had joined the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, those recorded as killed had fought for different Syrian groups including al-Qaeda offshoot Jahbat al-Nusra, Jund al-Aqsa, and Katiba al-Muhajireen (the battalion of migrants).
The British government claims that up to 500 Britons have traveled abroad to take part in fighting in Syria, and that at least 218 of those have returned to the U.K.
There are currently a number of cases relating to Syria ongoing in British courts.
www.aa.com.tr/en
