When he was 10, Mohammed Emwazi’s ambition for his 30-year old self was to be “in a football team and scoring a goal”.
Fifteen years later, on 16 November 2014, Emwazi would appear in an Islamic State video that appeared to show a mass beheading of Syrian soldiers. In the video, the young man warned the US president, Barack Obama, who he described as “the dog of Rome”, and his British counterpart, David Cameron, “Obama’s puppet”, that Isis would soon “begin to slaughter your people on your streets”.
Now 26 and apparently guilty of the beheadings of a number of western hostages, Emwazi seems to have little in common with the boy whose entry in his school yearbook, revealed on Friday in the aftermath of his unmasking as “Jihadi John”, suggests he liked to be called “Mo”, supported Manchester United and wanted to be a professional footballer.
As a child, the Kuwati-born Briton seems to have been thoroughly integrated into western society: among the list of his favourite things was a dinner of chips, the pop group S Club 7, The Simpsons cartoons and the best-selling Goosebumps book, How to Kill a Monster.
The only hint that the schoolboy was perhaps already developing a taste for violence is his favourite computer game: Duke Nukem: Time to Kill. Not recommended for children under 16, the single- and multi-player PlayStation game involves fights to the death in a strip club in downtown Los Angeles where female dancers mutate into pigs, accompanied by the song The Thing I Hate by the American industrial rock band Stabbing Westward.
