Young British Muslims are increasingly joining the Taliban and fighting UK Army soldiers in Afghanistan, a report in London-based The Independent newspaper says, quoting senior UK Army officers.
These so-called domestic or Home-grown jihadists are engaging in a 'surreal mini-civil war' with British forces in the Helmand province if Afghanistan, according to a brief prepared by a UK security agency.
Surveillance operations in Afghanistan have picked up the voices of jihadists speaking in West Midlands and Yorkshire accents, The Independent says, adding that the trend has increased in the past few months.
The paper quoted one senior military source as saying: 'We have been hearing a lot more Punjabi, Urdu and Kashmiri Urdu rather than just Pashtu, so there appears to be more men from other parts of Pakistan fighting with the Taliban than just the Pashtuns who have tribal allegiances with the Afghan Pashtuns. It is this second group, the Urdu, Punjabi speakers etc, who fall back into English. You get the impression that they have been told not to talk in English but sometimes simply can't help it.'
The Independent goes on to quote security sources as saying that some of these British Muslims had originally trained in Pakistan to commit attacks in Kashmir, but that the rising threat of Indian retribution, especially after the Mumbai attacks, had led to the Pakistani government curbing the activities of the Kashmiri terrorist groups.
Whereas domestic terror plots, such as the 7/7 London bombings, have thus far been the primary concern regarding radicalised British Muslims, these new findings show that tactics may be shifting. Rather than attack high-security targets in the UK, the young militants are now hoping to attack British and Western targets abroad.
The UK's Daily Mail adds that 'up to 4,000 British Muslims had travelled to Pakistan and Afghanistan' in recent times.
The British ministry of defence has refused to comment on The Independent's report.
