Teenage British jihadi 'killed in US airstrikes'

A GCSE pupil who quit his studies to wage jihad in Syria has been killed by the US air strikes, it emerged last night.

Ibrahim Kamara, 19, and four others are the first Britons to die in the attacks.

His mother, Khadijah, 35, said he had secretly travelled to the war-torn country and she felt ‘numb’ that he was dead.

The teenager, who called himself Khalil al-Britani, had recently completed a resit of his GCSEs at Varndean College in Brighton.

  

His single mother and her three other sons, who live in the Sussex city, are believed to be refugees from Sierra Leone who came to Britain via the Netherlands.

But football-loving Kamara ‘met the wrong people’ and was quickly radicalised. He is said to have recently vowed to a fellow fighter he would never return to Britain.

Mrs Kamara, who says she abhors violence, said she knew her son was likely to die when he rang her and confessed he was in Syria.

She said: ‘He called me in February. He said: “Mum, I’m in Syria”, and I hung up. He rang again and I said: “Don’t ever call me.” The first we heard about his death was when my younger son got a Facebook message from one of the boys he went out there with.

‘He sent a photo of Ibrahim dead and the message read “Congratulations, your brother has become a martyr”. My son told him to delete the picture but he refused.’

Mrs Kamara, manager of the Strive In The Way of Allah charity shop in Brighton, said of the 19-year-old: ‘He was a normal respectful boy. He had friends at school. He was studying IT and wanted to become an engineer.

‘He moved out recently but he had the spare key to my house and came round for dinner all the time.

‘I had no idea what he was planning. He must have been brainwashed. He went out there with three brothers from Brighton.

‘His passport was expired so he went up into my room and got the passport of his 15-year-old brother. It makes me wonder about the Border Control people because they look nothing like each other.’ The Foreign Office said it was aware of the reports of the dead Britons but could not confirm them at this stage.

Kamara was a member of Jabhat al-Nusra, an Al Qaeda affiliate which has fought with, and sometimes against, Islamic State. The group has also fought against the forces of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad in the country’s civil war.

Moments after a U.S. airstrike. In three waves of nighttime attacks launched over four hours early on Tuesday, the U.S. and its Arab partners made more than 200 airstrikes