London: A young British man who boasted of fighting “5-star jihad” in Syria has been killed, his family has revealed.
Ifthekar Jaman, 23, died at the weekend in a battlefield clash 2,000 miles from his Hampshire home.
He was one of an estimated 350 British men to have taken up arms with Al Qaida-linked groups in Syria — where they are known as British Kataa’ib, meaning British Brigade.
Speaking a month ago, Jaman declared he was ready to die as a martyr, vowing: “I don’t plan to come back. Life is for the hereafter... it’s an eternal paradise so the sacrifice is small.”
He also urged fellow Britons to join him, using his Twitter account to glory in his hate-filled missions. He described fighting in Syria as “5-star jihad” because of its “relaxing” nature.
Recent photographs show Jaman — a supporter of fanatical British cleric Anjem Choudary — apparently manning armed checkpoints in the Middle Eastern war zone.
On Tuesday, his parents were too upset to speak at their 190,000 pound three-bedroom terrace house in Southsea, but his younger brother Mustakim Jaman confirmed he had died on Saturday night and that his distraught family had been informed on Sunday. He said: “We are in complete shock. We need time to process this, it is a lot for us to take in.”
Jaman, was who born in Portsmouth and attended local schools, left the UK earlier this year after telling his parents he was going to study in Turkey, but he slipped across the border to Syria on May 14.
He joined ISIS (the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant), a notorious group of Al Qaida extremists waging jihad against the Syrian government of President Bashar Al Assad.
The last known pictures of him, circulated online at the start of this month, show Jaman and another Briton armed with AK-47 assault rifles and stopping vehicles at a dust-blown checkpoint.
Jaman — known in Syria as Abu Abdur Rahman Al Britani — used his Twitter page to glorify the lifestyle and criticise British parents who tried to stop their children from travelling to Syria.
He wrote on October 8: “These days, parents are more proud of their offspring getting bank jobs rather than joining the Mujahideen.”
On October 2, Jaman revealed: “There are people who think that the Jihad in Syria is 24/7 fighting but it’s much more relaxed than that. They’re calling it a 5 star Jihad.”
The exact circumstances of Jaman’s death are unknown, but last night he was described as a martyr in a series of posts on social media, including on Facebook.
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office said: “We are aware of reports of the death of a British national in Syria.”
The United Nations estimates that over 120,000 people have been killed in two-and-a-half years of civil war in Syria.
