By Con Coughlin

Every month a new batch of British Muslims leaves the country to risk their lives in Syria’s brutal civil war. For some, the hazardous journey is nothing more than an opportunity to alleviate the suffering of their co-religionists, after three years of bitter conflict that have now claimed an estimated 150,000 lives.

For others, particularly those who have been exposed to the extremist views of radical preachers teaching in British mosques, their purpose is not so benign. Apart from waging jihad in the name of Islam, they travel to Syria with the firm intention of linking up with militant Islamist groups such as al-Qaeda, hoping to join specialist training camps where they will receive instruction in the latest terrorism techniques, such as sophisticated bombs hidden in printer ink cartridges.

Figures recently compiled by MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence service, indicate that at least 500 British Muslims have travelled to Syria as jihadis, where they have met up with radical Islamist groups such as the al-Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), which seeks to create a hardline Islamic state in “liberated” areas of Syria and Iraq.

Of these, some have perished on Syria’s battlefields, such as 41-year-old Abdul Waheed Majeed, a father of three from Crawley who blew himself up after driving a truck packed with high explosives into a Syrian prison this year. Others, having experienced the brutality of a conflict where captured fighters are routinely decapitated in public and their heads paraded on sticks, decide that the rigours of jihad are not for them, and opt for returning home to lead a normal life.

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