A Cardiff-born teenager has been added to a UN sanctions list containing four other British citizens fighting with Islamic State militants in Syria.
Aseel Muthana, 19, has been put on the same list as his older brother, Nasser, who achieved notoriety when he appeared in an Isis propaganda video entitled There is No Life without Jihad.
Their father, Ahmed Muthana, has already described the inclusion of Nasser on the list as “crazy” after the 21-year-old and three people became the first to have UN sanctions imposed on them at the request of the UK government since 2006.
The others are Aqsa Mahmood, 21, from Glasgow; Omar Hussain, 28, from High Wycombe; and Sally-Anne Jones, a 46-year-old Muslim convert from Chatham, Kent. All have had travel bans and asset freezes imposed on them.
Aseel Muthana, who had planned to be an English teacher, is believed to have travelled to Syria in 2014 after telling his parents in Cardiff that he was going to a friend’s house to revise for a maths exam. He has described seeing “martyrs” to the Isis cause and says he does not plan to come home.
His older brother departed a few months earlier from the the family’s home in Butetown – a multicultural area between the city centre and Cardiff Bay – having said that he was going to an Islamic seminar in Shrewsbury.
Their father has also said that he fears that both men could be on a British government “hitlist”. Last year he described Nasser as having “betrayed Great Britain”.
Reacting on Tuesday to the inclusion of Nasser Muthana on the list, he said that his son had no assets to freeze, adding: “There’s nothing. We have nothing. I don’t know what the government and UN are thinking.”
The five Britons on the list are thought to be in Raqqa, the de facto capital of Isis on the banks of the Euphrates river in Syria.
On the Consolidated United Nations Security Council Sanctions List, Aseel Muthana is described as a “foreign terrorist fighter with Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant” and wanted by the authorities in the UK.
