A former al-Qaeda fighter who later became a spy for the British secret service says ISIS views the Britain’s European Union referendum in June with “great interest” , and is likely planning an attack in the U.K. which would persuade voters to leave the E.U.
(TIME)- Aimen Dean—who once swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden in person—tells TIME in an interview in London that Islamist extremists in al-Qaeda and ISIS would see the U.K.’s departure from the E.U. as a first step in the destruction of the union, which they see as a successor to the Roman Empire.
Much of the ideology of ISIS and al-Qaeda is rooted in theories of a clash of civilisation between Muslims and the non-Muslim world, which were formulated in the 7th century when Muslims fought for supremacy with the Byzantine (Roman) Empire and the Persian Empire.
Dean says that recent attacks in Brussels and Paris are also part of a strategy to destroy non-Islamic institutions and states and provoke conflict between Muslim and non-Muslims in the Middle East. This final battle, they believe, has been foreseen in religious writing and will herald the end of the world.
Whatever they [ISIS] can do to break up that empire is justifiable to them, says the former jihadist who became disillusioned with al-Qaeda in 1998 and acted as double agent until 2006, when his name was revealed in a book.
If the referendum result leads to the U.K. leaving the E.U., ISIS will take credit for having struck the first significant blow against the E.U., which it sees as representing the nations that carried out crusades against Muslim states for control of the Holy Lands between 1089 and 1390.
Dean,38, was brought up in Saudi Arabia but embarked on his first jihad in 1994 to fight with Bosnian Muslims against Serb nationalists in the former Yugoslavia. From there he went to Afghanistan where his Islamic education impressed aides of bin Laden.
Dean’s transformation came after the 1998 al-Qaeda attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which left 224 dead—all but 12 were local civilians. He disagreed with al-Qaeda’s justification for killing civilians and went from al-Qaeda activist to betrayer, with the help of the secret services of Qatar and then the U.K.