The breeding ground for jihadis where even the ice cream lady wears a burka: How Dewsbury, the once great textile town of the North, has undergone a terrifying transformation
- UK's youngest ever suicide bomber was from Dewsbury, West Yorkshire
- Talha Asmal, 17, killed himself by detonating car packed with explosives
- Several other British-born terrorists have also been radicalised in the town
- And it was home to the leader of the gang behind the London 7/7 bombings
Jean
Wood is determined to spend the rest of her days in Savile Town, a small
enclave of terraced streets in the once proud Yorkshire wool town of
Dewsbury.
This
is where she grew up, went to the grammar school and got married at the
nearby handsome parish church nearly half a century ago.
A
widow of 75, she likes to visit her grandchildren and tend the
flower-filled garden of her detached house on a steep road leading down
to the area’s community recreation ground, where the cricket club was
once the boast of Savile Town.
A woman in a full face veil runs the ice cream van in the Savile Town area in Dewsbury West Yorksire
Few
of her friends or relatives live in this part of town any more. Jean is
one of only 48 white Britons who have stayed on, while all the other
4,033 Savile Town residents, according to the latest 2011 census, are of
Pakistani or Indian heritage.
Their
forebears were enticed here as cheap paid labour for back-breaking jobs
in the wool mills in the late 1950s. Hard-working, they were soon
buying up the terraced houses, building their own mosques and opening
corner shops selling burkas, prayer mats and perfumes containing no
alcohol, in line with the strict teachings of the Islamic Holy Book the
Koran.
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‘The change happened so quickly,’ says Jean today. ‘One day it seemed it was all whites, and then it was all Asians.’
Jean
remembers when the first Asian family moved into Savile Town, on a road
named South Street where she was brought up. Her father worked for the
Yorkshire Electricity Board, her mother was a housewife and she was in
her teens.
‘We
peered at them and they peered back,’ she says now, as she serves a cup
of tea in her sitting room. ‘We had never seen anything like them and
they probably felt just the same about us. There was no prejudice, just
curiosity.’
Jean Wood is determined to spend the rest of her days in Savile Town, Dewsbury after spending all of her life in the area
Changing times: Today Dewsbury has gained another kind of terrifying notoriety - as a breeding ground for terrorists
Yet
feelings between the two communities have changed dramatically for the
worse in the years since. Across the world Dewsbury was always famous
for manufacturing wool products – it was said the town provided the
coats for British soldiers’ backs and the blankets under which they
slept too.
Today,
it has gained another kind of terrifying notoriety. First, the leader
of the gang of four bombers who attacked London on July 7, 2005, came
from here.
When
Mohammad Sidique Khan bade farewell to his pregnant wife on the morning
he led his fellow attackers to the capital to claim 52 innocent lives
in explosions on Tube trains and a bus, it was from a council house in a
quiet cul-de-sac not far from Jean’s house.
Next
came Britain’s youngest convicted terrorist, Hammaad Munshi. He was
arrested in 2006 when he was 16 while walking home from the local
comprehensive carrying two bags of ball bearings – a key component of a
suicide vest. Police later found a guide to explosives and notes on
martyrdom in his bedroom.
In
April it emerged that Munshi’s younger brother Hassan, 17, had secretly
travelled to the badlands of Islamic State. He went with his neighbour
Talha Asmal, also aged 17, a fanatical recruit who this weekend was
revealed to have become Britain’s youngest ever suicide bomber in Iraq.
Talha
was part of a four-strong team of IS assassins who killed at least 11
people in two separate explosions near the city of Baiji.
He
and Hassan took a Thomas Cook holiday flight to Dalaman, a resort in
Turkey, at the beginning of the Easter holidays and journeyed for miles
before crossing into areas controlled by IS.
Their departure focused a harsh glare, once again, on this small enclave of Yorkshire.
The families of the two missing boys insisted they were vulnerable, impressionable teenagers brainwashed over social media.
Talha Asma, from Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, has become Britain's youngest suicide bomber at just 17
The 17-year-old was reportedly part of a team who killed 11 after blowing themselves up near an oil refinery
Troubled town: Talha Asmal lived just minutes from the mosque attended by 7/7 bombers Khan and Tanweer
Yet
can everything be blamed on the internet? Others believe much of Savile
Town, now one of the most racially segregated places in Britain, has
become so dangerously steeped in a violent brand of Islam that young men
there are encouraged to be suspicious of, and even hate, the West.
When
I visited recently, as families played on the recreation ground where
the cricket pavilion was torn down long ago, almost everyone seemed to
be Muslim. Even the woman serving ice cream from a van bearing the
slogan ‘Nice and Creamy, Cool and Dreamy’ was wearing a burka so
extensively covering her face that even her eyes were hardly visible.
And almost every girl waiting their turn in the queue was clad in Islamic robes, including those of five, six and seven.
Not
far away there is a Sharia Court which was criticized recently in a
House of Lords report for discriminating against women in the
matrimonial disputes it oversees.
The
area has several private madrassa – Islamic schools where young boys
(and some girls) learn the Koran by heart. Today only two pubs remain
out of the nine that once dotted the streets. The others have either
been demolished or turned into mosques. Towering over the street where
Jean Wood was raised is the giant Markazi mosque. It was built in the
1980s with Saudi Arabian money on a piece of land where the local
bowling green club stood and locals used to tend their allotments.
Now
it is the European headquarters of Tablighi Jamaat, a global Islamic
missionary movement with an austere, ultra-conservative religious creed
nurturing the belief that British values pose a threat to Muslims.
One
of Tablighi Jamaat’s leading advocates, the scholar Ebrahim Rangooni,
has proclaimed that the movement’s purpose is to rescue Muslims ‘from
the culture and civilisation of the Jews, the Christians and other
enemies of Islam.’
He
tells the faithful to ‘save your progeny from the education of the
British school or college in the same way as you would save them from a
lion or wolf’.
Savile Town in Dewsbury - where the population of more than 4,000 people consists of just 48 white Britons
Killers: 7/7 mastermind Mohammad Sidique
Khan (right) and fellow Tube bomber Shehzad Tanweer (left) were also
from the West Yorkshire town
Most
of the Savile Town mosques follow the same conservative tradition. One
is called Zakaria and is located just around the corner from where the
two latest jihadi recruits, Talha and Hassan, grew up. They are believed
to have worshiped there because it was founded by one of the boys’
grandfathers.
One
man who has seen Dewsbury change is 56-year-old Danny Lockwood, an
author and local newspaper editor, who has lived here all his life. He
says: ‘The prodigiously industrious first generation of Asian immigrants
who came to our wool mills later turned the town into the UK’s capital
for bed-manufacturing. They brought with them an incredible work ethic, a
single minded aspiration to succeed and a strong religious tradition.
‘But I fear that their offspring and later arrivals seem less fond of hard work. They are also influenced by the mosques.’
Danny
also blames the ever- widening cultural chasm on local white liberal
politicians who, over decades, signed up to the dogma of
multiculturalism.
‘They
did not expect new immigrants to respect British ways or Western
values, but encouraged them to develop their own culture with no
questions asked,’ he explains.
He
cites the example of the two local Tory grandees who, seeking support
from the Muslim community, gifted the historic Savile Town cricket
ground to the giant Markazi mosque on a 999-year lease. The pitch was
soon abandoned and turned into a community recreation ground with slides
and swings for children.
Before
long, a summer gala there was cancelled by councillors amid claims that
a planned beer tent offended Muslim sensibilities regarding alcohol,
and at the local hospital it was reported that nurses were helping turn
patients’ beds towards Mecca, the holiest city of Islam, so patients
could pray in the correct manner – although this was never official
policy.
In
Savile Town, I visited the snooker club where Hassan Munshi and his
friend Talha were regular players until they took that Thomas Cook
flight.
Hassan Munshi (left) and Talha Asmal (right) lived on the same street in Dewsbury and were best friends
Dewsbury is now the European
headquarters of Tablighi Jamaat, a global Islamic missionary movement
with an austere, ultra-conservative religious creed nurturing the belief
that British values pose a threat to Muslims
Paranoid schizophrenic Haroon Aswat
(right), also from Dewsbury, plotted to set up a terrorist training camp
in the US with hook-handed extremist Abu Hamza (left)
Outside, I asked two boys of a similar age about the two who had left.
‘We’ve
been told at the mosque not to talk about that, and you should not be
asking about it,’ snarled one tall lad in a Yorkshire accent. ‘Go away
from here and stay away,’ he added. After a long search, I find a second
person who is not of Asian descent other than Jean Wood living in
Savile Town.
Lorraine Matthews has a tall house across the road from the canal, having moved here four years ago.
A
dentist’s receptionist with four sons, her links with this part of
Dewsbury stretch back to when her father was a ‘rag-grinder’ who
operated a machine turning old rags to powder in the wool mills. ‘I used
to go down there as a child and watch him work,’ she recalls.
After getting married, Lorraine, now 53, moved away. She admits she got a surprise when she returned.
‘I
wouldn’t go out at night on my own as everyone knows it is dangerous if
you are not from the Asian community. My son was riding a motorcycle
and was chased by a group of Asian lads in a car. He fell off and they
took one of his shoes. He wouldn’t go back in a hurry.’
Alarmist
hearsay? Jean Wood has similar stories. When she was returning on a
church-organised coach trip to a pantomime in Bradford four years ago,
the bus was bombarded with stones thrown by a group of local Asian
youths. She believes they wanted to frighten the passengers about being
in the area. No doubt local Muslims have their own stories of hostility –
certainly the tensions seem real.
I
ask Jean to revisit South Street where she grew up – she hasn’t been
for 20 years even though it’s less than half a mile from her home. It is
an emotional journey and when she arrives, a group of residents – many
of them women in full face veils – turn to stare at her.
Another resident says: ‘I wouldn’t go
out at night on my own as everyone knows it is dangerous if you are not
from the Asian community'
(From top row left to right) Jewel Uddin,
Mohammed Saud, Zohaib Ahmed, (bottom row left to right) Anzal Hussain,
Mohammed Hasseen, Omar Khan. They plotted to attack an EDL rally in
Dewsbury
However,
smoking a shisha pipe in his garden is Haran, a 44-year-old owner of a
local Savile Town bric-a-brac shop. He invites Jean in to join him. ‘Are
you coming back for some memories?’ he asks.
They
reminisce about the long-gone hairdressers in South Street where ladies
in rollers put their heads under huge dryers (a sight that Haran says
his parents, who arrived from India in 1962, had never seen before).
Then the talk turns to why Savile Town has turned out ‘some bad young ones’.
‘We
tell them to stop thinking of going to fight jihad in Syria and Iraq
and we hope they will,’ says Haran, after another puff on the pipe. ‘But
who knows what will happen next?’
Sadly, it is a question that few in troubled Savile Town – whether they are Muslim or not – are able to answer.
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