British Jihadist Gets 'Facebook Martyrdom' from American-Led Airstrike

A British citizen has been reported as killed by an American-led coalition air strike in Syria, after he abandoned his school studies to join an Al-Qaeda group in the war torn country. The news emerged as one of his fellow fighters from Brighton, East Sussex posted a photograph of his corpse to Facebook and congratulated his family on his martyrdom.

Sierra Leone-born Ibrahim Kamara, 19, was radicalised after falling in with the “wrong people” in Brighton, and went to Syria to fight for al-Nusra, the local Al-Qaeda cadet branch. Remarkably, the youth didn’t even have a passport when he went to fight, which as the Daily Mail reports led his mother to remark: “His passport was expired so he went up into my room and got the passport of his 15-year-old brother. It makes me wonder about the Border Control people because they look nothing like each other”.

Kamara’s mother, who works for local charity “Strive in the Way of Allah”, which raises money for schools in Sierra Leone said she was made aware of her son’s death when one of his friends, who had also gone to Syria posted a photograph of his body captioned “Congratulations, your brother has become a martyr”. Other Islamists fighting alongside him reportedly posted tributes and claimed he was killed in his sleep by a drone strike. One said: “May Allah Accept You Ibraheem Kamara. What an honor”.

Local Al-Qaeda organisation al-Nusra has taken a beating from American air strikes over the past few days, with a significant number of their fighters killed. The organisation self-reported that its leader has been killed yesterday, posting a photograph of Abu Yousef al-Turki’s body on Facebook in tribute to his so-called martyrdom.

Al-Nusra is a sometime ally and sometime enemy of ISIS in Syria’s constantly shifting conflict. A Sunni mujahideen group, it was established to defeat Assad’s Ba’athist state but now appears more focussed on establishing its own area of political control, setting it up as a rival for territory with expansionist ISIS. Its allied group, Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, is fighting to achieve similar aims in neighbouring Iraq.