Mothers in colourful headscarves shoo their children inside al-Medinah mosque as the call to prayer flows from a window above, while men enter via an adjacent entrance.
Worshippers at the mosque, on a hill overlooking the sea in Brighton, are shocked and saddened by the death of Ibrahim Kamara, a regular here until a few months ago.
They are deeply unsettled by the news, which came just months after another teenager, Abdullah Deghayes, a fellow jihadi from Brighton, died on the same battlefield, and the unwelcome spotlight it has cast on their community.
Kamara, 19, who went to Syria with Abdullah and two other Deghayes brothers who also worshipped here, is believed to have been killed in a US airstrike in Syria. One woman who knew Kamara described him as “an innocent”.
“I don’t know how his mind was changed,” she said.
Imam Uthman, the leader of the mosque, who tried in vain to dissuade the 19-year-old from joining the steady stream of foreign jihadi fighters in Syria, believes that, unlike Cardiff and Birmingham, where there is evidence young men have been targeted by extremists on the ground, Kamara and the others were recruited and supported via online networks.
“The majority of things he was saying, he had taken from social networks,” said Uthman. The imam said he did not know about specific websites, but said he got his impression from the way Kamara talked about them.
Kamara, who was killed earlier this week, travelled to Syria in February to join the Deghayes brothers to fight for Jabhat al-Nusra, an al-Qaida affiliate that has fought against both the forces of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, and Islamic State militants in the country’s civil war.
Uthman said the brothers had also worshipped at his mosque, but were not regulars.
No one can pinpoint exactly how Kamara turned from a respectful young man into a jihadi fighter who “dreamed of martyrdom”, according to Jaffar Deghayes, in Syria.
Kamara’s mother, Khadija, a single mother of four, told the Guardian that it had happened very fast. She noticed a change in his attitude a few months before he vanished, she said, but she never believed he would go to Syria to fight.
“He would say ‘these people are killing Muslim people, we will have to do something about that’. I knew he was thinking that way, but I didn’t come close to thinking he would go there.”
When he began spouting extremist beliefs, she sought the imam’s help. Over a three-month period at the end of 2013 and the beginning of 2014, Uthman took the teenager aside to talk. At first, Kamara would discuss his desire to be involved in the humanitarian effort in Syria, but then “his mindset changed”.
“At the beginning of our conversations he was in denial,” said Uthman. “Then he became a bit more free. He said humanitarian aid wasn’t enough. I sat him down and explained to him his responsibilities to his mother and the other children. I said it would be better for him to work, to earn money and to send it to Syria.”
Uthman believed he was getting through to Kamara, but it became clear that he was not. At one point, fearful of the effect he was having on her younger sons, his mother demanded he left home and he moved out. Then, he disappeared, turning up in Syria.
She worries still about her three remaining sons – Jibir, 14, Mohammed, 15 and Sulaiman, 11 – who are devastated by their brother’s death and his decision to fight in Syria.
“They have been so angry and disappointed,” she said. “They thought he was being stupid, even the little one, the youngest one. They know it’s not right. It didn’t make any sense. That was clear to them.”
She spoke of the brutal way that Jibir found out his brother was dead on Facebook, where Kamara’s fellow jihadi, Jaffar Deghayes, was boasting that he had become a martyr.
“Jaffar posted Ibrahim’s photo to my son on Facebook. He is friends with Jibir. He posted it saying: ‘Congratulations, your brother has become shaheed [martyr] this morning.’
Kamara’s friends from Varndean school and sixth-form college, where he resat his GCSEs, struggled to reconcile memories of the boy they remembered as kind, funny and friendly with the one who died on a foreign battlefield. Keir Barraclough, 19, an economics student at Bristol University, who was at Varndean with Kamara, said: “I only ever saw him smiling. He was a very positive person. I feel really shocked and sorry for his mum.”
Sonam Nguyen, 19, who studied science with Kamara three years ago, said: “He was a really kind person. I couldn’t imagine him going over there. I remember him being quite religious, going to the mosque and stuff, but never being that extreme.”
Nguyen said that, at that time, in 2009, Kamara and Amer Deghayes were close.
Mishruna Kibria, a friend of Khadija and part of a Bangladeshi women’s group in nearby Moulsecoombe, said that many parents are so fearful of an unseen radical influence that they have stopped their sons going to the mosque.
“Mums have been saying ‘I don’t want my sons to go to the mosque’,” said Kibria. “But we don’t know where it happened or how it happened.”
Across town, at the Masjid al-Quds mosque, where the father of the Deghayes brothers, Abubakr, is a trustee, Sheikh Mohammed Tolba was reluctant to discuss the issue. “This mosque is moderate,” he said. “We don’t support or encourage anyone to travel to Syria. These boys travelled without anyone knowing.”
An estimated 500 to 600 Britons are known to have travelled to Syria, and 250 have since returned.
Tarique Jung, of the Brighton and Hove Muslim forum, said it was a mistake for anyone to believe there was a problem of radicalisation in the town.
“It’s not a Brighton problem,” he said. “It’s a worldwide issue. There are people from every country going [to Syria]. It’s coming from outside. It’s on social media. They are saying something that is galvanising the minds of young people. There are people helping them, training them.”
He said of Kamara: “This is a young boy who any mother would be proud to have as a son, who was a kind boy, who had never been in jail, or in trouble. How is he getting all this information? The police don’t know, so how are ordinary people going to know?”
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