Portsmouth terrorist cell

The Portsmouth jihadists are five Bangladeshi British men from Portsmouth, England who came to Syria to join the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant in October 2013. They had been recruited by another Portsmouth man, Ifthekar Jaman, who had traveled to Syria in May. Jaman was killed a few months later, and only one member of the Portsmouth cell survived.

The men were Assad Uzzaman, Muhammad Hamidur Rahman, Mamunur Mohammed Roshid, Mashudur Choudhury, and Muhammad Mehdi Hassan. They were the focus of a book, Alex Perry's Once Upon a Jihad. Criminal charges were laid against Jaman's brothers in connection with assisting the Portsmouth jihadists.

Life in England Little is known about Mamunur Mohammed Roshid, who was 24. Muhammad Hamidur Rahman, also 25, worked at Primark. Muhammad Mehdi Hassan, 19, was attending sixth form college repeating one of his A-levels. He had excelled academically and had plans to study international politics at the University of Surrey. Mashudur Choudhury, 31, the oldest of the men, was married with two children and would later be described as a "serial liar". He said his failings and his lies, which included faking cancer, had made him "utterly ashamed and embarrassed".

In May 2013, Jaman quit his job and left the UK alone. He went to Syria and joined ISIL after being rejected from Al-Nusra Front. Twitter and Instagram, calling it "five star jihad" and encouraging Muslims, including his friends back in England, to come to Syria. Hassan told his mother he would only be gone for three months and told her to instruct his college he would return to take his exams.

They flew out of Gatwick Airport and travelled to Reyhanli, a Turkish town on the Syrian border where they met with a group of three other British men who were from Manchester, one of whom was Raphael Hostey. After meeting one another, the two groups contacted Jaman, who helped them cross the border into Syria. He said after witnessing the war-torn situation, he changed his mind and returned home while the younger men went to join an ISIL military training camp. Choudhury was sentenced to four years.

Jaman was killed by a tank near the city of Deir ez-Zor in December 2013, a few months after the arrival of the recruits from Portsmouth and Manchester.

Hassan adopted the nom de guerre "Abu Dujana" in Syria. He married Sumaiyyah Wakil, a 16-year-old girl who had run away from her British-Bangladeshi family of ten siblings in August 2014 and gone to Syria, leaving a note telling her family she wanted to be a martyr. Hassan was killed in October 2014, during the ISIL offensive to capture Kobane. Hassan would later be featured in a 2021 documentary, Secrets of an ISIS Smartphone.

Roshid was killed the same month as Hassan, on October 17. By this point, at least five British people were travelling to Iraq and Syria to join ISIL every week.

The story of Jaman and the Portsmouth recruits was told in Alex Perry's book Once Upon a Jihad: Life and Death with the Young and Radicalised, which came out in January 2015.

Criminal charges laid against relatives In 2015, Ifthekar Jaman’s brothers back in England, Mustakim Jaman and Tuhin Shahensha, were both charged with preparing terrorist acts for providing assistance for the five Portsmouth men in traveling to Syria, including using their bank accounts to transfer money. Jurors at their first trial, in May, had been unable to reach a verdict. In October, the two men were convicted. Tuhin Shahensha was also convicted of preparing to travel to Syria himself. A counterterrorism police officer said the brothers had not had plans to attack the UK. They were sentenced to six years each in prison. Mustakim Jaman changed his name to Isaac Idris. In 2021, Isaac Idris was jailed again for eight months after pleading guilty to eleven breaches of a Part 4 Terrorist Notification Order under Section 54 of the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008, including failing to tell police details of his finances, his phone number and his email addresses. In 2023, Moses Idris was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for not telling the police about a phone number.