A British man jailed over a website considered a key moment in the birth of online jihadist propaganda said he had been "naive" to support the Taliban.
In his first broadcast interview, to the Victoria Derbyshire programme, Babar Ahmad, 41, said he had "not knowingly" supported Osama Bin Laden. Ahmad was jailed in the US in after fighting a record eight-year campaign against extradition.
He condemned so-called Islamic State as "alien" to his heritage and beliefs. In , the former IT support worker pleaded guilty in the US to two counts of providing material support to terrorism. Two articles on pro-jihadist Azzam Publications website had urged Muslims to send money and equipment to the Taliban.
Ahmad's July sentence of just over 12 years took into account the 10 years he had spent in jail in the UK prior to extradition - so he was freed in June Find out more. US judge Janet Hall said Ahmad had shown genuine remorse for supporting the Taliban, but she added: "You can't walk away from the fact that what you were doing was enabling Osama Bin Laden to be protected in Afghanistan.
Ahmad said he had "not knowingly" supported Bin Laden as at the time he did not really know what the al-Qaeda leader "was all about". And whatever was going on then, I didn't have to advocate support for them. British authorities never charged Ahmad, but he admitted he was a terrorist "in the eyes of US law".
He said: "At the time I pleaded guilty, I'd been in prison for nine-and-a-half years without trial. Babar Ahmad helped him go to Afghanistan, via a Taliban contact in Pakistan. Ramsey has never been accused of wrongdoing. He says that he attended Arabic classes in Kabul and Jalalabad. Jihad was among questions the young convert wanted to explore - and he met some Londoners who wanted to fight. I know that friends can turn but as far as I am concerned no, he was not that way inclined.
Never once did I ever see him promote, encourage or push for the killing of anyone. One source from Tooting told me that Ahmad and his friends were so wrapped up in this fervour that they were "desperately seeking jihad" - but they often didn't know what it really meant. He would have known that Usama had once fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan. He wanted answers. What should you do? What is your religious duty? But there was this complication for Islamists about loyalty to Muslims, so should you hand over Muslims to the police?
I went to religious scholars in this country and I got a firm answer from them. You must do whatever it takes to stop terrorist action. And I conveyed that to Babar. I honestly don't know. One was defensive - the right to take up arms to prevent oppression. The other was offensive: Osama bin Laden's indiscriminate violence and hatred dressed up in religious clothes.
When I met Babar Ahmad in prison in , he told me what he thought. Saajid Badat - the supergrass - provided evidence to support what Ahmad told me in that interview. Despite appearing for the prosecution, he told the court that he didn't want to testify against his former mentor - because he did not believe that Ahmad had ever supported al-Qaeda.
Back in the net was tightening. MI5 officers interviewed Babar Ahmad and bugged his home - a sign that they were really worried. Two years later the Metropolitan Police arrested him - only to release him without charge. That raid had a hugely damaging effect on relations with Muslims in London. Multiple sources have told me that Babar Ahmad's behaviour changed - his mood soured dramatically. Eyewitnesses have told me that he would tell sympathisers that there was now a "war against Islam".
In , the police were back again, this time with an extradition request from the American authorities. The legal basis for this was simple, the fact that Azzam. That triggered his much-publicised eight-year-battle to stay in the UK. Almost , people supported him in an official petition.
His brother, Hamja, described the relationship between the two convicted men: "They were marginal friends. Talha wasn't Babar's number two, he's not even his The US can say the extradition was just because Ahsan pleaded guilty, but his supporters believe there was a very limited case to answer. Afghanistan was just like a hyped-up state. I would say it was like a rites-of-passage, scholarly interest for hundreds of British Muslims at the time.
It was nothing particularly dangerous or harmful at the time. During the American court case, prosecutors stressed that Talha Ahsan was one of Ahmad's recruits on a journey to terrorism - but the sentencing judge rubbished these claims as exaggerated.
Hamja Ahsan says the way jihad has been presented gets to the heart of the problem. Ahmad and Ahsan have now been sentenced. The Americans presented him in court as a terror mastermind who placed men on a conveyor belt to al-Qaeda. Before he was sentenced, Babar Ahmad admitted he had been wrong to support the Taliban.
He said he was driven by idealism and religious fervour - and he now knew that the world was a more complicated place. But in a last twist in this tale - the judge sentencing Babar Ahmad not only concluded he wasn't an international terrorist, she cast doubt on the reliability of the supergrass evidence.
Ahmad's sentence of and-a-half years reflects her assessment. Ahsan is going free because of his time served while on remand. Ahmad is likely to be back in the UK within months because of the time he has spent in prison. What will happen to him when he returns?
What is left of "Core al-Qaeda", as it is known, is believed to be based in Pakistan's tribal region after fleeing Afghanistan in But the world's counter-terrorism officials have little cause to celebrate. Rather than eliminating al-Qaeda, they have caused it to atomise and disperse, morphing into several different organisations around the Middle East, Africa and Asia, with large numbers of jihadist sympathisers in Europe. Ahmad's former friend Usama Hasan now works for the Quilliam Foundation which advises governments on how to combat extremism.
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