Mick Hartley

It's a tricky business, this social work. From the Sunday Times (£):

Police and social services missed a number of chances over at least five years to intervene in the radicalisation of three brothers from Brighton who joined a terrorist group in Syria, a report reveals.

A review for Brighton & Hove city council, a draft of which has been seen by The Sunday Times, details how officials misinterpreted the behaviour of Amer, Abdullah and Jaffa Deghayes as antisocial rather than evidence of growing extremism…

The review describes how threats by Jaffa in 2012 to kill people in the name of Allah were attributed to drunkenness rather than radicalisation.

According to the review, the teenager screamed: “I will kill you . . . Allah will seek his revenge for me, do what you want to me, see what happens when judgment day comes, you will all go to hell.”

Well yes….you hear that sort of stuff all the time outside pubs at closing time.

Jaffa, Abdullah and Amer came to the attention of police in 2009 when “there began to be reports of the boys being involved in ASB [antisocial behaviour] and crime, getting into fights”.

In September 2013, after he continued to be involved in low-level offending, Abdullah refused an offer from Sussex police’s anti-terrorism unit for “voluntary engagement”, the report says. By that time, Amer, who the report says was a father figure to his younger siblings after their parents’ divorce, was thought to have travelled to Libya or Turkey before crossing into Syria. Even so, a senior social worker deemed Abdullah to be neither a “serious risk to himself or others”.

In January 2014, Abdullah left the UK for Syria, breaching a youth rehabilitation order. Jaffa also fled Britain. The report says police were told by the Deghayes family that they had gone to Libya to visit relatives and it was several weeks before it was discovered they were in Syria.

Graham Bartlett, the LSCB chairman who commissioned the review, said the intention was to “establish whether there are lessons that need to be learnt in order to help prevent these types of tragedy from being repeated…."