Similarities between radicalised Britons are 'striking'

One week he was in Dewsbury studying for his A-Levels - a “loving, kind, caring and affable teenager”, according to his family. The next week, Talha Asmal was with so-called Islamic State in Iraq, where he would eventually become Britain’s youngest suicide bomber.

Thomas Evans, in his mid-20s, was a little older. He was from a different part of Britain, had a different background, and was fighting with a different terrorist group on a different continent but he had been lured by a similar cause to Talha Asmal. He was killed fighting with al-Shabaab on the Kenya-Somalia border last week.

For all the differences between these two cases, it is their similarities that are most striking: ‘normal’ boys who were quickly radicalised - their families and the authorities unaware that they were slipping into the grip of extremism.

Shocking as they are, these characteristics are familiar to so many of the hundreds of cases of British youngsters who have travelled to Iraq, Syria and Somalia.

But the differences between Talha Asmal and Thomas Evans demonstrate how broad the appeal of Islamist extremism has become - and, perhaps, how shallow our understanding of what lures so many British citizens still is.

Today the Prime Minister’s official spokesman said the Asmal case “underlines the need to do all we can to prevent young people from travelling to these countries”. But how?

With the government’s ‘Prevent’ counter-radicalisation strategy best known for its high profile failures, and with at least 700 British citizens fighting in Syria and Iraq, the answer is that no one seems to know.