Waheed was an ordinary boy who played football and loved sci-fi movies. This year, he blew himself up in Aleppo. Abu Jamal left to join the jihadis. Tauqir is an aid worker who can never come home. This is the story of Britons risking their lives in Syria, and the families left behind

Randeep Ramesh
The Guardian, Saturday 26 July 2014

The bomber

The last time Abdul Waheed Majeed spoke to his family, it was on a crackling telephone line from Syria at the end of January. He had arrived six months earlier on an aid convoy organised by his local mosque in Crawley, and had been working in refugee camps along the Syrian-Turkish border, laying pipes and delivering food to those displaced by a grinding civil war.

Waheed told his family that he missed them all very much and loved them, and thanked them for looking out for his three teenage children and wife. His father, Abdul, was perplexed by his youngest son’s vagueness about when he would return and insisted on getting a date out of him. Waheed said he’d be back by April.

But he never came back. Six days later Waheed, at 41, became the first British suicide bomber in Syria and the 10th UK national to die on the Syrian battlefield. Since that last call home, Waheed had joined the al-Qaida offshoot Jabhat al-Nusra, fighting against Bashar al-Assad.

He had driven HGVs for two decades in Britain in his job with the Highways Agency. Now he got into an armoured dump truck laden with explosives and slammed into the gates of Aleppo central prison, alleged to be a torture chamber for 4,000 imprisoned rebels. Waheed’s mission hit its mark. Hundreds of prisoners escaped, but 300 people died in the ensuing firefight between the Syrian air force and the rebels. In the competitive world of performance terrorism, al-Nusra released a 43-minute video showing the truck’s journey, to publicise its triumph.

Over cups of tea in Crawley, the West Sussex town where the Majeeds have lived for decades, Waheed’s elder brother Hafeez says they missed the clues in his last call. “With hindsight, we should have sat up when he said, ‘I love you guys and look after the children.’ But we just wanted him home.”

A day after the attack, the news on Twitter was that the bomber was British. Waheed’s wife Tahmina rang a few of the women she knew whose husbands were in Syria, and they said he had joined al-Nusra. “But we had no concrete proof. Frank Gardner [the BBC’s security editor] said on the news that the bomber’s name was Abu Suleiman al-Britani. We didn’t know the name. It was only when the video was released three days later that we saw him.”

In the video, Waheed is wearing a white dishdasha and headband. Surrounded by Chechen militants, he is asked to say something but declines because he cannot speak Arabic. When the cameraman insists, Waheed says: “I don’t want to try. It should come from the heart and I can’t do it.”

Hafeez says the first time the family saw the video, “it was hard. We all cried. Until then Mum and Dad did not want to believe it, but then it hit home. The phone calls stopped, too. We knew he was not coming home. It is a horrible thing to say but we wanted it to be someone else’s son.”

Piecing together his brother’s final days, Hafeez says Waheed had been shaken by a defector from Assad’s regime, who provided evidence of industrial-scale killing to senior war crimes prosecutors. “After speaking to his friends, we think what made up his mind was those pictures of 11,000 torture victims that came out in late January. He was deeply affected by that and we think that made him join al-Nusra.

“We feel that if he hadn’t got a beard and was white and wearing a uniform with a crown on his arm with a regiment number, he would have been awarded the posthumous Victoria Cross. Instead Waheed is called a terrorist. How can that be? He gave his life to save people from that prison.”

Raised in Crawley by Pakistani-born parents, Hafeez and Waheed grew up like many of their peers: playing football in the park and eating fish and chips. His mother Maqbool, 70, opens the family album to show a young boy with a bike, or a teenager with a smile stealing across his face.

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Waheed with his mother. His brother says the family tried to talk him out of it. ‘He said Assad was not letting aid get in and people were being bombed, families torn apart. He said he had to go.’ Photograph: Courtesy of the Majeed family