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( soft violin music )
( man speaking English )
This is James Wright Foley,
an American citizen of your country.
The Foley video, partly the image,
but even more the voice of his captor
was really shocking because it was so clearly
a British London accent.
Man: The way that he spoke into the camera, his demeanor,
his accent, we'd never seen anything like this before.
We then obviously had a race to find out who he was.
His size, his hands, but above all his voice
made identifying him quite easy.
It was very distinctive,
and within hours we had a name
for that individual, Mohammed Emwazi.
Mohammed Emwazi: You are no longer fighting an insurgency,
we are an Islamic army and a state.
Woman: You saw a masked man with a knife,
and he sent this message that the Islamic State was here,
it was not Al-Qaeda, everyone knew about Al-Qaeda,
but ISIS, Al-Baghdadi, these guys were different,
they were this new brand.
Man: The Islamic State could not have planned it any better,
if there was one thing that I think contributed
to the rise of his fame and the expansion of his own message,
was the fact that the international news media
called him "Jihadi John."
Man 2: Jihadi John, he knows that we're coming after him,
he went to great lengths to prevent being captured.
He didn't want to get captured,
he didn't want to get killed.
How did you go from this conservative,
sports-loving teenager to somebody who's splashed
with the arterial blood of the men he's beheading?
This is not just a subtle transformation,
this is literally going from nothing
to everything with little in between.
( soft violin music )
( bombs exploding )
( bomb exploding )
Woman: Mohammed Emwazi, he had an interesting journey,
but not one that's particularly different to other people.
He started off in Kuwait
where his family were a persecuted minority.
They were known as the Bedoon tribe
with people who were not recognized nationally
by the Kuwaiti government.
Man: His father was more successful than most Bedoon
because his father was a police officer
and his mother was a Yemeni.
So, the Emwazis, like lots of Bedoon,
were considering where to go
in terms of escaping the persecution,
and they'd heard good stories about London.
So the Emwazis with little Mohammed in 1993,
when he was about six years old, packed their bags
and headed for London.
And they were then subsequently given asylum in the UK.
Robert Verkaik: They moved into a small flat in Maida Vale.
His father, Jassem, he began work as a cab driver
and they began to build a family.
For Mohammed, his first school
was a Church of England primary school.
Dr. Emman El-Badawy: And Emwazi spent his life growing up
as somebody who I guess was always wondering
about his identity,
someone who's family had to leave their home country
because of their identity,
and then subsequently trying to figure out
how he fits into this new society in the heart of the UK.
Verkaik: He supported Manchester United,
but he also liked pop groups like S Club 7.
♪ There's people try to put your down ♪
♪ Just walk on by, don't turn around ♪
♪ You only have to answer to yourself ♪
Verkaik: In his year book at primary school
he said his big dream was to be
a Manchester United football player.
It's all he wanted to do.
Woman: Mohammed was in year 10 when I started as Head.
He wasn't a particularly noticeable young person.
( children chattering )
Woman 2: I met Mohammed through teaching English for about a year,
so I didn't teach him for very long,
but the family I grew to know really well
because his younger sister was then in my next year group.
He wasn't vocal, he wasn't particularly aggressive,
he was just a kind of, like a passenger.
I always see Mohammed as like a passenger.
He was much more of a follower than he was a leader.
He kind of hunched and tried to make eye contact with me.
He found that difficult.
He often walked around covering his mouth
and sometimes some young boys would tease him
about his breath, but that was, I think,
it was more of an insecurity for him.
Verkaik: If kids starting baiting him about his breath, he'd react.
They'd start ganging up on him
and they knew which buttons to press with Emwazi.
It just shows how kind of vulnerable he was.
He was slightly strange.
I wouldn't say he was a misfit.
I think that's probably a bit too pejorative,
but I think he wasn't necessarily sure
exactly where he fitted in.
On the playing field where the boys would play football,
I remember one time I confiscated the ball
because I was being hit every second.
At one point, Mohammed was nearby,
and I kind of looked at him.
"Wasn't me miss."
I said, "Okay, just move on."
He wasn't argumentative, he wasn't rude,
he wasn't aggressive.
He just was very pliable, he just would... just be.
( speaking in foreign language )
Have you finished every level?
Sorry.
( speaking in foreign language )
Claudia Giarruso: But the few occasions
I would take the class into the computer room,
Mohammed would gravitate to those computers.
He would love to be in the computer room
and it's almost like he came alive
when he was in front of a screen.
In away it was kind of a world that he could escape to.
Man: I think it is useful to begin at the beginning,
you know, where did ISIS actually begin?
El-Badawy: Prior to 2010,
no one knew who this guy called Al-Badri was.
He was this unassuming individual brought up in Samarra,
east of the Tigris in Iraq,
and he buried himself in religious text and scripture.
He was obsessed with the debates
and disputes around the contemporary called jihad.
He was essentially a bookworm.
Al-Badri later changed his name to Al-Baghdadi.
But he'd also come into contact in the early 2000s
with a notorious member of Al-Qaeda called Zarqawi.
( speaking in foreign language )
Zarqawi, a very effective, charismatic, superior leader.
Zarqawi was a master of the management of violence.
- ( gun exploding ) - ( bombs exploding )
So he led the insurgency against the coalition
and Zarqawi ended up pioneering the business model
of suicide bombers.
- ( bombs exploding ) - ( sirens whirring )
And with the Islamist views that Al-Baghdadi had developed,
combined with the views that Zarqawi communicated,
he became incredibly influenced.
Baghdadi was well placed to network and recruit
for Al-Qaeda and particularly Zarqawi's version of Al-Qaeda.
And so, I see a distinct difference between the two.
Zarqawi had a plan and he ruthlessly executed that plan,
whereas Al-Baghdadi had a vision for what he wanted to do
and a vision has a longer-term timeline
and it has a broader set of aspirations and expectations.
( upbeat techno music )
( train whirling )
As Emwazi progresses through his teenage years
he's drinking, his friends say he loves clubbing,
he's smoking cannabis.
He's got a reputation for being a bit of a party animal.
Shuter: So, my perception of him once he got into the sixth form,
and he-- obviously he wanted to go to university,
but he did become less willing to fit in.
The level of defiance in him grew,
and I remember occasions when he was asked to leave lessons
because he just wasn't working.
Verkaik: Some of his older friends in the community
are part of street gangs.
This is another theme in Emwazi's life.
He's very much influenced by older men.
So, all key figures in his life
tend to be people who he can look up to
and some of the gang members were involved in crime,
one or two served jail terms for stealing bikes,
drugs offenses.
Emwazi himself was arrested and put on trial
for a string of bike robberies.
He was eventually acquitted of that,
but by association he was being drawn into
this kind of crime lifestyle.
Shuter: He was part of a very supportive,
inclusive school environment and going on to university
a lot of those kinds of support structures are withdrawn
and I think that for any vulnerable young person
being part of a very big faceless university community
is where some of those issues would have set in.
Like we've said, he was one of those invisible young people
that we assume everything is okay,
and in hindsight it obviously wasn't.
( speaking in foreign language )
If you try to look at the physical origins
of the Islamic State as a fighting force,
the seeds were sown in places like Camp Bucca,
News reporter: This is a new frontline
in the fight against terrorism, Camp Bucca,
the United States biggest detention facility in Iraq.
Inside Camp Bucca there are more than 19,000 civilian detainees.
They are neither criminals, nor prisoners of war.
Wise: There's a significant amount of mystery about Baghdadi
and the circumstances of his life
that ultimately resulted in him being incarcerated
in Camp Bucca.
He knew that the best way for him to survive in that camp
was to take on the persona of a senior respected individual
in the camp community
by gaining the trust of the US military.
When I took over command of the surge
as a four star in early 2007,
it was quickly apparent to me
that this was almost a terrorist training university.
We had failed to remove the true extremists
from the midst of the population
where they were proselytizing
and essentially running these particular areas.
General David Petraeus: These are all Al-Qaeda,
but this is not a place that you want to hang around
so we really don't wanna stand here that much longer
because they will now organize around us
and you can already see the lieutenant's ready to move.
- Man: If you go back just. - Petraeus: Yep.
Petraeus: Look at them think, look at them put two and two together.
They are watching, when I'm looking at them here,
it's just like they are watching really, really carefully.
Petraeus: I know, I know that, and not only that,
there's another unique matter,
notice how because they are a collective society
they don't think alone.
They're thinking on groups of three to five
with somebody else standing behind asking them
to ask the question so he doesn't get identified.
Inside a compound like this, there are leaders.
We don't know yet who they are.
Wise: Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, clearly understood
not being a warrior himself
that he could in fact lead and manage warriors.
So, this was the laboratory in which his culture was grown.
You had an alienated group of Iraqi officers
mixing with some extremist elements
that were already there.
The two came together in a sort of symbiotic way
that over time, because this didn't happen overnight,
a lot of these relationships were formed,
but didn't flourish for a number of years
until suddenly there was a marriage of convenience
and they fired each other up.
When he was released for cooperative and good behavior
from Camp Bucca, he continued
to manage the persona of a good Iraqi citizen.
He hid literally in plain sight.
Petraeus: The days of Zarqawi are over...
and now Iraqis can rejoice and take pride
in what has been accomplished in eliminating that threat.
Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi used that timeframe
between the death of Zarqawi
and the destruction of Al-Qaeda in Iraq
to exploit the relationships that he had made in the camp
and consolidate his infrastructure and
in a position to declare the existence of the Islamic State.
Verkaik: Mohammed Emwazi turned up at Westminster,
and he was wearing
a Pittsburgh Pirates baseball cap and tracksuit.
There was nothing really Islamic about him.
Man: So, he started in 2006,
a normal teenage lad with normal aspirations.
but something happened over the intervening three years.
We'd had reporting on him
during some of his later university years
that he was becoming more extreme.
It's likely the strongest influence on Emwazi at that time
were two specific individuals.
Mohammed Sakr who had also been to the same school,
but three years older than Emwazi had already been to Kenya,
he'd been arrested, he had lots of stories to tell
about how he was leading this really exciting life.
- ( guns exploding ) - ( singing in foreign language )
As charismatic as Sakr was,
his friend, a guy called Bilal Berjawi,
he'd also been to Kenya, he'd been arrested,
he'd been accused of being involved in terrorism.
He had double the charisma, he had double the stories.
And it's become increasingly apparent
that radicalization isn't something for lonely people.
There's a strong social process that happens.
What started off as him just being a difficult teenager,
doing lots of delinquent activity
to becoming actually someone who wanted to redeem himself
and return back to his original Islamic identity
and practice it more wholly.
A very insightful story from one of his old school friends
who was sitting in a shisha bar on the Edgeware Road
and Emwazi and two associates
were walking down the Edgeware Road in their white robes
and the friend says to Emwazi, "Hi Mohammad, how are you?"
This is a new Emwazi.
He doesn't acknowledge old friends anymore.
He walked past with his head in the air.
This was, he'd moved on.
( train clanging )
Man: There are similarities between a criminal lifestyle
and recruitment for jihad.
So everyone's looking for a sense of purpose
and meaning and significance in life
and the jihadist milieu presents itself
as a David versus Goliath mentality
for those that are disenfranchised.
We give a family to those that never had a family before.
Prisons have becoming breeding grounds for recruitment,
for the very reason that it's very easy to take someone
who has an affiliation with a gang and convince them
that they should act out and lash out against their society
because they already have that.
You present Islam as an ability to transform that
into something powerful and positive.
It gives structure where there was none
and it can be very beneficial at first.
They start to go to school, they start to associate with positive religious friends.
Their interest in reading and studying changes,
but it's really part and parcel
of that first step into extremism.
It is a major tool for recruitment
'cause you're selling a complete lifestyle
in the same way that a gang sells
a complete countercultural lifestyle.
You're selling a countercultural, gang-like lifestyle.
And so the two correlate rather well.
( clock ticking )
Verkaik: Having left university in 2009,
they cast their eyes around the world
and the region they land on is Somalia
because Somalia is in the grip of an Islamic revolution.
Somalia was the only jihad in town
as far as they were concerned.
Looking at it from his eyes,
all he wants to do is go and take part
in what he would describe as a humanitarian mission.
He thinks that going to join an Islamist group in Somalia
is like working with children in crisis.
You know, conveniently ignores the fact
that Al-Shabaab, they've been involved
in a number of terror atrocities already,
they've got blood on their hands,
they are a hugely destabilizing force in the region.
March 2009, Emwazi teamed up with a couple of friends
and they set off to Tanzania
where they said they were going to go on safari.
( plane engine whooshing )
Walton: I know and we know, we were running operations
against West London Islamists at the time
and we were fully aware of their intentions,
which were not to go to a safari.
Verkaik: When they arrived in Dar es Salaam,
they were greeted by the Tanzanian Security Services.
They were locked up for the night, subject to beatings,
generally roughed up you might say,
and we know all this because of Emwazi's own accounts
of what happened to him.
( Mohammed Emwazi speaking )
They went back via Amsterdam, when they arrived at Amsterdam,
they were met again by security service officers
from both the Dutch security service and MI5.
( Mohammed Emwazi speaking )
Verkaik: He was quizzed in Amsterdam for 12 or so hours.
On his return to Dover he was further questioned
by British Security Services.
Walton: We made approaches to him,
we wanted to give him the opportunity to work for us
and to actually desist from becoming a terrorist.
( Mohammed Emwazi speaking )
They rammed home this idea
that life could become uncomfortable for him
unless of course he wanted to cooperate with them.
Perhaps let us know what some of your friends are up to.
To Emwazi this was a red rag to a bull.
This is not something that he's prepared to do.
It's an ultimate betrayal of everything that he has become.
( Mohammed Emwazi speaking )
The challenge for the service in the context of Jihadi John is understanding
how his mental state is evolving
because there's lots going on in his life,
lots of traumatic events that would be traumatic to anybody
let alone somebody who's already got a sense of persecution by the state.
If there's any suggestion at all
that it may have the opposite effect,
then the recruitment ought not to take place.
Walton: There's always a risk when you make these approaches
and the chances of success are in any event
fairly minimal, but you can't not do them.
You have to give an individual an opportunity
to not go down that path.
But we've got to be careful.
There's a nature/nurture debate within that.
Was he always likely to carry out that kind of activity
or did he carry out that activity just because he was approached.
I think it's unlikely that was the turning point.
Emwazi now had something to tell his friends.
He'd been stopped by the cops.
He'd been insulted, he would say,
by the security services.
He'd received a beating in Tanzania.
You can imagine how proud he was, he'd come of age.
He was a serious jihadi player now.
El-Badawy: I mean in my line of work, I remember monitoring Al-Qaeda
and by chance happened to track
the rumblings of another group,
another sort of fringe organization
that had sprouted from old Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Baghdadi had spent much of 2010 building a network
of veteran jihadists who had been running the course of time
to find the next big conflict.
( bombs exploding )
News reporter: As the Syrian struggle intensifies,
the battle to remove the Assad regime
is pulling in volunteer fighters from across the Arab world.
But the chaos unleashed by the uprising has also drawn in
foreign jihadists, Islamic extremists,
some believed to be affiliated to Al-Qaeda.
( speaking in foreign language )
And Abu Akbar Al-Baghdadi saw an opportunity
and so he dispatched an operative named
Al-Julani to Syria,
and Al-Julani created the Jabhat al-Nusra,
which was the initial extreme Islamic presence in Syria.
News reporter: So far, US support for the rebels
has been limited to non-lethal assistance,
communications equipment, humanitarian aid,
but no weapons.
Arming a fragmented opposition
that has some extremist elements carries a risk,
analysts say, but so does staying on the side lines.
What we've done in the case of Syria
is just enough to keep the war alive,
but never enough to allow it to be won.
We never provided the support for the moderate elements
of this uprising, and it was the more extreme elements
that were pursuing the bolder action.
El-Badawy: Jabhat al-Nusra started to embed themselves
within the rebel forces in Syria and this was at a time
when a lot of Rebel groups,
whether they were Islamists or not,
they were pretty disorganized
and so any level of organization filled a vacuum,
and Baghdadi was ready to do that
because of the work he'd been doing since 2010.
What Baghdadi built in Syria swept back in to
first western Iraq drawing strength and money
and ammunition and explosives and vehicles and so forth.
This was a terrorist army
and they spread through Iraq really like a cancer,
and they move through the Sunni portions of Iraq.
They get dangerously close to Baghdad,
News reporter: The Iraqi government is losing control.
This is happening with unbelievable speed.
A violent Islamic group has launched
something of an invasion.
News reporter: A Sunni Islamic terror group formed last year
after being expelled from Al-Qaeda for being too radical.
But who are they?
They're the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria,
I-S-I-S for short.
Petraeus: And so you have ultimately tens of thousands
of disenchanted Muslims who come to rise up
in this very twisted interpretation of Islam
that is propagated by a leader with extraordinary vision
and quite extraordinary operational skills
and this is, of course, Al-Baghdadi.
The latest reports are that police forces in Mosul
were taking off their uniforms, laying down their guns and leaving.
News reporter: There is a video
that has been released by this group ISIS
that shows what seems to be a very grisly massacre
about 150 Iraqi soldiers lined up, executed.
The ISIS guys are effectively, using medieval warfare ethics.
Of course, human society has moved on
in the ensuing centuries and now we don't kill prisoners
and we don't take slaves.
( speaking in foreign language )
( people screaming )
( speaking in foreign language )
Dr. Usama Hasan: But for ISIS they reject modern convention.
They're trying to stick to literal interpretations of texts
from the 7th and 8th centuries.
So this is a battle for the heart and soul of Islam.
Verkaik: In May 2009, Mohammed Emwazi
has been through quite an ordeal.
When he finally gets back to London,
still smarting from the indignities
of the interrogations and detentions,
he then discovers that his fiancée's family
have received a visit from the security services.
( Mohammed Emwazi speaking )
Walton: So his fiancée was approached and, of course,
she was then deterred if you like.
She then walks away from him.
Verkaik: For them, who are a very conservative Somali family.
This is a problem.
Not only have they messed with his own life,
they've messed with his girlfriend's life.
( Mohammed Emwazi speaking )
Verkaik: This is a transgression that confirms everything
that he's been told about the British Security Services.
Walton: Bilal Berjawi, who'd returned back to London
after being trained in a training camp in East Africa
and, of course, he was inspiring his little cohort.
Verkaik: The point about Berjawi was that he could motivate
all of the London boys and if he said,
"Let's go 'round rattling tins
and collecting cash outside the mosques,"
then they'd all do it
and Emwazi obviously got caught up in that.
The money was being transferred back over to Somalia,
then obviously being used to buy firearms
and to support Al-Shabaab.
Effectively that's terrorist fundraising,
that's what he was engaged in.
Verkaik: While he's being stopped when he goes out, questioned.
He's being followed, he's having to get involved
in counter surveillance activities,
so he's sort of jumping on trains at the last minute.
He's leaving his mobile phone at home.
He's meeting in parks with associates.
I mean he's looking very suspicious.
McKay: As a young Muslim on the fringes of extremist activities
he was a legitimate target.
In fact, the service would have been failing in its duty
if it didn't keep him under some kind of observation.
Walton: What you have with individuals like this,
you have an emerging intelligence picture,
based on intelligence that you're receiving
from individuals that are associating with them,
who are working for us and they're telling us
that he's becoming more hard-lined, more extremist
and more of a threat.
Verkaik: Emwazi's family were concerned about their oldest son.
His younger brother Omar, who I met and who told me
that the family hatched a plan
where he would travel to Kuwait, stay with his grandmother
and he would escape, not just the attention
of the security services, but also the influence
of the gang that he was running with
and that's what he did.
He took a job with a computer company
where he was involved in the technical side of the company
and he also had a salesman role as well
and the boss thought he was an excellent worker.
He'd met another girlfriend,
someone who he also wanted to marry.
So he was still intent on having a family life.
He was enjoying his new life, he was happy.
It's always a question about what drives a terrorist
to become a terrorist.
and it's often a range of motivations.
It's not just a top-down process of recruitment.
As we used to say, the obligation
is not to convert the entire world,
but to make the truth accessible to those that seek it,
so these are seekers.
If you look at what motivates
and what motivated young people to go out to Syria
many of them were going to pursue a romantic notion
of a high-minded, religiously inspired, faithful,
pure way of life in a way that young people
in lots of countries will want to do something worthwhile
with their lives.
Brutal honesty, I didn't want to sit
in a nine-to-five job.
I wanted to be part of something bigger.
My dad, joined the RAF when he was around about 17.
He saw a lot of suffering, a lot of things there.
I think that's when he first started
to get this love of helping people
I feel especially attracted by the Middle East
because it is close and still very different,
and it is also where the roots of our civilization are.
I became a holy warrior at one point.
At the age of 19, I took part in jihad in Afghanistan
fighting against Afghan communist soldiers
who were backed by the Soviet Union.
For me, the experience of the jihad
was actually very positive
and we were defending oppressed people
and taking part in military activity when you're 19,
it's really cool to fire guns at that age.
Woman: Jim was driven by what he saw
and the more he saw of the suffering of the people,
the more compelled he felt to tell their stories.
So there was a dilemma around the journalists
and the aid workers who were traveling out there
and in many respects they were causing us more and more problems.
Bethany Haines: My dad went over to Croatia and then on to Libya
just giving out aid and then he got the job going to Syria.
Syria was the single biggest humanitarian crisis at the time.
I felt like I had something to offer.
Um... I guess it was exciting.
I thought that I got some addiction to adrenaline,
but while some war reporters may be
only driven by adrenaline,
I was also driven to tell the story of people.
And I think as it got more dangerous,
more and more media were pulling out of Syria
and so I think he felt more and more compelled
to do what he felt he knew how to do.
Walton: And of course to a war reporter,
it's part of their day job
to go to these difficult areas,
but there was just massively high risk for anyone
traveling into that region.
( gunfire blasting )
( singing in foreign language )
Walton: At one time, you had Islamic State
pulling people out of cars, abducting them
and then they were filming all of this process.
Haines: And these particular videos
have been deliberately put out in the open for ISIS
to communicate its processes of rooting out spies
and people who are trying to undermine the cause for ISIS.
Walton: Once an individual knows that they are under the scrutiny
of the state they then have to develop,
if you like, cover stories for their activity.
Verkaik: Unfortunately, Emwazi has problems with his teeth.
He tries Kuwaiti dentists,
but none of them can solve his severe tooth ache.
He can't sleep, so he speaks to his family
and they say come back.
We were receiving intelligence that potentially
he's still aspiring to become a hardened terrorist.
I would only say that what we don't know is
what else he's doing in Kuwait.
All we know is that he's coming back and forth.
So he comes back for the second time.
Walton: Of course raising again the suspicion of the authorities
that he was not content with his life in Kuwait.
Verkaik: He turns up at Heathrow Airport a few days later,
this time he's detained in the airport.
Walton: According to his father,
he's prevented from going back to Kuwait,
not by the Kuwaiti Intelligence Services,
but by British pressure
on the Kuwaiti Intelligence Services.
McKay: Would it be a legitimate use
of the security services powers to invite another state
to decline a visa? Possibly.
But it's equally as plausible that the Kuwaiti government
just didn't want him in the country.
Verkaik: Unfortunately, he learns while he's in London
that Kuwaiti Security Services
have visited his Kuwaiti fiancée's family.
They have introduced the idea
that he may be linked to terrorism.
Again, the family call the wedding off.
His whole life is being, as far as he is concerned,
funneled in one direction.
Can't go to Kuwait,
finding it impossible to exist in London,
his intentions are now focused on extreme lifestyle,
the full jihad.
Emwazi was defiant even in those early days
in terms of his approaching an organization called CAGE,
who purport to represent the interests of Islamic causes.
He visits CAGE, he discusses with them
his problems he's having with the security services.
They suggest that if he really wants
to get the security services off his case,
he should go public.
And this is when I am introduced to Mohammed Emwazi.
We speak to each other on the telephone, we switch emails.
Emwazi and I agreed to meet at a cafe.
It became very clear early on that this was a serious man.
This wasn't someone who thought it was interesting,
exciting perhaps, to sit down
and chat about his experiences.
This was a defiant young man,
who was convinced that he had been the victim
of a wrongdoing, and it was my job to try
and help him right that wrong, which was fine by me,
because give us a good story, and I'll print it.
That was my approach.
But as the conversation went on,
he started to tell me about the fiancées
and how the police had destroyed these engagements,
and that was what sold his story to me.
It seemed to me, if I believed him, a real step too far.
So, by approaching CAGE, by speaking to a journalist,
this was his strategy for countering our interventions.
These are the early signs of him
if you like being offensive against the state.
Verkaik: Unfortunately, he'd emailed me back
saying he'd spoken to the families
and he wasn't confident they would agree
to have their pictures in the newspaper.
He had pictures, but he couldn't pass them on to me
because that would be a breach of trust.
So, I had sort of half a story, really.
So, we never really got the story off the ground,
and that was the last contact I had with him.
( rockets roar )
James Foley: Syrian government forces
continued to bombard Aleppo beating back rebels
of the Free Syrian Army, but the battle
for the country's largest city
is also taking a deadly toll on civilians.
The regime has bombed hospitals, homes,
even people standing in line for bread.
Diane Foley: I guess the biggest, most obvious silence,
was Thanksgiving of 2012.
Jim was always very cognizant of holidays or birthdays, or...
and certainly Thanksgiving.
To not hear from him was odd...
and so we were a bit concerned.
And it actually was the next morning,
the morning after Thanksgiving,
when one of his colleagues called to tell us
that he had been captured.
So... that confirmed our fear.
Nicolas Henin: Raqqa was taken six weeks or so
before I arrived in the city
and I wanted to do mostly political reporting.
We entered the former headquarters of the Ba'ath Party.
The following day we came back to their headquarters
and they just attacked us in the street.
That was a trap.
And they drove me for about 20 minutes.
When they removed the blindfold I was in a bathroom
and they locked the door.
( door slams )
I noticed the bars of the window were potentially a bit weak
and in the evening, I removed the bars jumped outside.
I was free and that was one of the most exciting nights
of my life, even though I was terrified,
especially the first 100 meters or so that I ran,
and I was praying that no one would have seen me.
But after I took some distance, I was like, Oh, that's so good!
That's so good! I am winning!
These bastards!
What a good trick!
( man panting )
I was euphoric.
I wanted to reach Raqqa.
I noticed already the lights of Raqqa on the horizon,
so I had the direction and very early in the morning
I arrived in a village.
As I entered the streets all the dogs start barking...
and I'm like, "Oh, shit, I wanted to be discreet."
And the first people I met were two guys wearing pajamas,
and they were jihadis.
I couldn't recognize them
because nothing differentiated jihadis wearing pajamas
from someone else wearing pajamas,
and they took me back to the local police station
and they rode me back to the very same cell.
To be taken back is almost worse than to be taken.
I was like... ahh!
Wow.
Now the real shit begins.
( bomb exploding )
Walton: In 2012, Emwazi's two mentors,
Bilal Berjawi and Mohamed Sakr, are killed in drone strikes
by the American administration.
Verkaik: This must have a been a devastating moment for him
because while they were away,
Emwazi was close to both their families.
He was involved in looking after Bilal Berjawi's, um, son.
He took a sort of an uncle's role.
I think it was probably a turning point.
Walton: And then you have a bigger problem on your hands
because then they're more determined to travel
and they'll find a way, as indeed Emwazi did.
At some point in 2012, Mohammed Emwazi
managed to slip out of the country.
Perhaps he joined a convoy with other friends,
we're not entirely sure who he went with.
So what we'd hoped to stop came to pass.
In a sense all we did was held back the inevitable.
Whether we contributed to his further radicalization
and his clear anger and vitriol against the British state
by stopping him from travel is an interesting question.
News reporter: More than 70,000 Syrian refugees
have flooded into Turkey in the past 24 hours,
according to UN officials,
and that number could grow to more than 100,000.
I was working for an organization called Impact Initiative
so we were doing the humanitarian data assessment,
providing data that would inform humanitarian programming.
David was a, he was a big guy.
When you first meet him,
he was someone who inspires confidence
when you're going into places.
He was a wonderful guy.
We had very similar ideas as to the good and the bad
of what we were doing.
I think we connected really quickly
and felt comfortable around each other.
We spent the Saturday, Sunday primarily in IBP camps
moving around and also for me, it was the first time
that I was in Syria.
The 12th of March, I think was a Tuesday,
we'd gone in in the morning and we went to a town,
a small town called Atarib, and on our way back,
I was on the phone with my boss in Geneva,
and at one stage we passed two black cars.
We were on a dirt track and we got to a junction
where the road sort of widened
and became a more normal road I guess,
and that's where these cars who had been now behind us,
sort of one of them overtook.
They blocked us out, and these masked fighters jumped out and surrounded the car.
I actually dropped the phone with my boss still on the line.
I managed to say to him that we were getting kidnapped,
that we had a problem.
It all happened very, very quickly.
I just have like flash recollections.
I just remember the car, faced down on the ground,
in the boot, David was put in just before me,
and then they couldn't get the boot shut,
and that's where I saw a guy on his bicycle, cycle past.
You could see he was sort of like,
but at the same time he just cycled continually.
It just happened in a flash.
The next thing you know, we're speeding away, very very fast.
Haines: On my 16th birthday,
I was actually in France with some friends.
My dad would always contact me on my birthday,
no matter where he was and it got later on at night
and I thought, something's not right
and I started to get a sinking feeling,
so I phoned my mum quite upset and said to her,
"Look I've got a really bad feeling.
You need to find out what's happened."
My head automatically assumed the worst,
so when she said he was kidnapped
it was actually a part of a relief
to find out he hadn't been killed,
but of course your mind goes everywhere.
I thought why would someone kidnap someone
who was only there to help.
Walton: So Emwazi finds a way out to the new frontier,
to the new global jihad in Syria,
and very quickly finds a new mentor,
a Chechen warlord called Shishani,
who was leading the ground called K.A.M. within Syria,
and it was really a breakaway group
from Al-Qaeda or al-Nusra front.
Verkaik: Shishani, a man who'd had war experience in Chechnya,
had developed a brutal reputation for committing atrocities,
but who saw in Emwazi someone who would follow orders to the letter.
Walton: Who would carry out almost any brutal act
if directed to do so,
and Emwazi became quite well-known and reliable,
if you like, to the leadership of this new group.
( speaking in foreign language )
Verkaik: Kata'ib Al Muhajireen had become slightly fractured,
half the group was aligned with Al-Qaeda,
and the other half, led by Shishani,
were more interested in making links
with the emerging Islamic State as is now.
And Shishani decided he would take his group
to join the Islamic State, and with him...
Mohammed Emwazi followed.
El-Badawy: Once within Islamic State,
Emwazi and Shishani are led
by the Emir of Aleppo, Amr al-Absi.
Al-Absi's a seasoned terrorist
and a close confident of the ISIS leader,
Al Bakr Al-Baghdadi.
Under the guidance of Al-Absi,
Emwazi and Shishani, along with some UK recruits.
Alexander Kotey, Aine Davis, and El Shafee El-sheik,
started a mass hostage-taking campaign
all across Northern Syria.
With that, they captured hundreds of Syrian prisoners,
but they also captured a very important group of western hostages.
The Islamic State emirs felt that because of his loyalty
and because of his willingness
to carry out acts of brutality without question,
Emwazi would be perfect for this,
and perhaps they were right.
So, Emwazi, this career jihadist,
is moved through the ranks.
He graduates effectively, suddenly with the opportunity
to actually fulfill his dreams as a proper global jihadi.
Henin: The faces of most of our guards, we haven't seen them.
The funny thing is that we nicknamed them.
It's a kind of coping mechanism.
There is something you don't control, you bad guard.
It is the name that I give to you,
and this you will never control it.
The most common name that were known through the media
were, of course, The Beatles.
The guys that we nicknamed The Beatles
were British born, native British accents.
And they were the first people
that conversed with us in the car.
When they'd taken our passports, I think,
the very first thing was when they said,
"David, welcome to Syria, you mutt,"
or something like that,
'cause I think they'd looked through his passport
and then they asked David if I spoke any English.
Interviewer: So, they actually kidnapped you?
Yep.
And so, they reappeared and reappeared throughout,
um...
that first month.
Henin: So, the Beatles were obviously British hostage takers.
We understood that they probably were friends
even before arriving to Syria
because they were very close.
They were not always together,
but most of the time at least two of them
would come together.
John was the boss.
He was the one giving orders to the others.
He was the one in charge of collecting the proofs of lives.
George was the punisher.
He was the most violent in the group.
I remember his, uh...
fat hands,
and the third one was Ringo.
Ringo was the preacher.
The less violent of these three.
The one would from time to time explain to us
why they were doing that.
Emwazi was in control of what happened.
I mean, he initiated and allowed a lot of our punishment,
and he was very much involved.
He also sort of set the tone for the guards.
They took a lot of their inspiration
from what they had heard about places like Abu Ghraib,
and what the coalition forces in other countries had done.
Guantanamo was referenced all the time
by Emwazi, in particular.
But the orange materials,
at various stages we were wearing jumpsuits, all of us.
And so things like stress positions,
and not allowing us to sleep, just stand up all night.
Things like that.
Some of us received much more violence than others,
and that was for reasons that I couldn't understand.
We knew there were another two captives
in the same location.
You could hear their screams, and they could hear ours.
And eventually we met them.
It was James Foley and John Cantlie.
And they put us into a cell to do a royal rumble.
Basically, get us to fight against each other.
The cell that John and James were in,
because the ceiling was so high at the top it had a latch.
So, they brought us in and then went up to the top,
and then were like giving us instructions about,
and they were watching from above,
and so they had Dave and me in one corner
and John and James in the other and they wanted us to fight,
and, like...
we obviously weren't gonna fight each other,
but you kinda couldn't not fight.
I mean there was potential for punishment.
I remember we sort of went through the motions initially,
realized we couldn't 'cause they were saying if you don't start,
you know, and you have to, we were like skeletons by then.
I think every one of us fainted at some stage or another
just from exhaustion.
So, we weren't exactly hurting each other.
But, they found it highly entertaining.
( speaking in foreign language )
Petraeus: Baghdadi has this extraordinary vision.
He clearly has very impressive organizational skills,
however twisted the ideology,
however twisted the interpretation of Islam,
however extreme the actions,
but he does something truly extraordinary.
Man: In 2014 we saw the Declaration of the Caliphate.
It was directed to idealistic people,
who wanted to live in the perfect state,
and who had learnt since their childhood
about this wonderful idea of the caliphate,
which a lot of Muslims very much cherish,
including Muslims who would not have
the slightest sympathy with the likes of ISIS.
It was a bit of a chicken or an egg situation for ISIS.
It was establish the caliphate and then figure out a way
of making it work later on.
Announce it to the world and you would get attention
and people would flock.
( speaking in foreign language )
I think it's like grooming,
and even worse than that, because they are promising them,
and to the group, this is not us,
we are just passing the message of god.
This is an order from god.
Here is the Koranic verse telling you that you should go,
you should migrate to the caliphate.
You should leave the land of the Kuffr, which is Britain,
and go to the caliphate.
Propaganda was very well targeted to individual groups.
They'd be different videos for Australians,
for people in the Philippines,
for people who had specific interests.
Videos for young girls, videos for young boys.
Some would be very violent and horrifying,
some would have nothing, but soft focus pictures
of the golden corn being reaped
and the beautiful fish being brought in on the fishing boat.
El-Badawy: The videos are there to make them actually
feel some positive emotion.
So for example, getting them to feel
that there's a sense of solidarity
amongst the ranks of ISIS, and that brotherly comradeship.
And all of this gives the audience an impression
that this is the non-trivial world.
That in living with ISIS, you will actually start
to feel a sense of purpose.
It is not just about killing people,
but there's a wider cause
that you're sacrificing your life for.
Anderson: That, in a way, was one of ISIS' unique selling points.
They had as they would put it a country to sell,
and they were able to present it as a country
where you might want to live.
You would look at some of it and think,
well, I'd like to go and live there.
If you believed it, you would want to go and live there.
And so many people, particularly young people,
went out there on the basis of that dream
that the propagandists had put together.
Motka: There was a lot of talk around the fact
that there was an Islamic State now,
that we were prisoners of a state,
therefore, there were rules.
Henin: I spent a couple of weeks in a cell on my own,
and then at the end of the year,
we are 19 men in the same cell.
Being in a group is hard too.
I mean you're whatever number of grown men in a tiny room,
foot-to-toe in terms of how you sleep,
right next to each other.
For a couple of months,
the Beatles were not violent with us.
It was more like an enterprise,
so you don't damage the merchandise.
Some of the proofs of lives were obtained
in a neighboring room.
Jihadi John would then be the one directing the filming.
So he would give us the instructions.
"Okay, you arrive this side, you say that,
and then you stand up and leave the frame."
And... he would stand next to the camera,
and there would be another Beatle behind the camera...
just pressing the button.
News reporter: There have also been fresh clashes
in the rebel enclave of Aleppo, Syria's second city,
and once its commercial heart.
( tanks firing )
El-Badawy: As ISIS begin to lose control of Aleppo,
Al-Absi, Emwazi, and his fellow Beatles flee
to the safety of the state's de facto capital, Raqqa.
Before fleeing, they kill around 300
of the Syrian prisoners,
but they keep hold of their precious cargo
of Western hostages.
Once they're in Raqqa, Baghdadi appoints Al-Absi
to oversee the state's media department.
This position gives Al-Absi and his cell,
which includes Emwazi,
ample opportunity to reek havoc
using the hostages that remain.
( speaking in foreign language )
Man: I appeal to the people who have Jim
to give us some information
in terms of his welfare, his health.
I tried very hard to remind our government
that Jim was alive, but we really didn't receive much help.
We received an email from his captors,
they asked for proof-of-life questions,
so they could assure us they had Jim,
and we were very excited to hear from them.
I mean of course there was the proofs of life
where like the one thing that sort of said
there's obviously something going on.
I mean, we all were aware of various government positions on this issue.
Well, we don't negotiate with terrorists or pay ransoms
or pursue those kinds of activities
because it just begets more terrorism,
it encourages more actions.
But of course, it's a very difficult policy to explain
to the loved ones of someone who has been kidnapped
and of course the overall policy objective,
I think even they can understand why,
but of course they want an exception in their case.
We were back and forth on email for about a month
and then they cut off all communication after that.
So it was kind of a tease, if you will.
Motka: Dave and I always believed that
because we were taken together, there was a good chance
that we would be negotiated for together.
I genuinely believed that there was an option
and then the moment that you realized...
that I realized, through that sort of
final proof-of-life process...
that this was only for me.
It was probably one of the most bittersweet...
um... emotions I think I've ever had.
When they eventually came to the room and said,
"Okay, the four French here, come and we were blindfold,
handcuffs, and we take you out."
It was like, I just had time to say well goodbye everybody.
We had no time for big hugs or whatever.
For some reason the day that I was picked up,
the Beatles were super aggressive.
They pulled me into the center, then they tried to,
they gave me a beating, but then they took it out
on everyone around as well.
And just before they put the blanket over my head,
they made me go back to the door, and sort of say...
"and say goodbye to your friends," or something like that.
Henin: Normally when you are taken hostage,
once you are released you are free.
But in our case, when were released,
we left 15 pals behind us.
You know these guys aren't just people or friends,
they're brothers.
And I think I spent more time sleeping next to David
than any girl at that point in my life.
( helicopter blades whirling )
( applauding )
Foley: We were very hopeful when the Spanish hostages
were released in February.
Shortly thereafter, the French were released,
and so we were incredibly hopeful.
They told us that Jim was alive and well,
and strong, and were very encouraging.
And I actually returned to France in July of 2014,
hoping to get some help from France.
It was while I was in Paris
that we received the threatening email.
Threatening to kill Jim.
I was hopeful they were back in touch,
but again I was very naive.
I don't know if they ever desired to negotiate.
It's hard to know...
but certainly not at that hour...
they weren't.
I think they had come to realize
that Jim was worth more as propaganda.
I call on my friends, family and loved ones
to rise up against my real killers, the U.S. government.
I was totally unaware of it
until an AP reporter
called me sobbing...
and I couldn't even understand what she was crying about,
and she told me to look on Twitter.
So that's when I saw the image
and...
I knew it was Jim...
and... that's how I found out.
I didn't know if it was authentic,
and so I reached out to our FBI agent,
but really didn't hear back from anybody.
So, I didn't know if it was true
until the president announced it that evening on TV.
So it was... you know...
it was, um...
it was awful.
It was really very difficult.
The last time I saw James and David
and a lot of the others was when the videos came out.
And then the message to America, it was, it said...
I don't like to use their words.
I like to, uh, be, uh...
precise and factual.
That was a...
filmed murder.
That's it.
Of an innocent journalist.
Of a hostage.
But, um...
Yeah.
I would say...
we were told...
and then once the first one came out,
sort of...
there was the threat of the second, the next.
So then after that you know, it's just...
will it, won't it,
and then the second...
and, yeah, it was just...
Henin: David was a very complex and interesting character.
Very smart.
Very good at understanding people.
Very supportive, also.
Motka: Generally, we were all very close as a group,
but of course everyone has maybe one individual
that they would turn to...
and for me that was Dave.
Um... you know he, he...
I hope I was of...
of help to him.
Um...
But, I know, I think I was...
able to sort of
give what I could, and I think everyone did the same.
( sirens whirling )
Haines: I had been at my boyfriend's house that night,
and he lives in the middle of nowhere,
next thing I know there's a knock at the door
and all I can remember is seeing the blue flashing lights
reflected in the window.
I still didn't click on.
I thought I had done something wrong.
I was terrified, thinking what am I going to tell my mum
when I'm in the back of a police car.
And then I heard her voice, and my boyfriend said,
"Is it her dad?"
My mum said yeah.
And I remember deliberately taking ages
to come out of the room
'cause I knew what was going to come,
and I just didn't want to hear it,
and my mum had said to me a video had been released.
"It's of your dad."
And that was the moment that I found out
that my dad certainly wouldn't be coming home.
My name is David Cawthorne Haines.
Haines: It took me months to be able to cry.
I didn't feel any kind of sadness.
It was anger...
and then there was also hope.
Hope that the others would get out,
such as Alan Henning, Peter Kassig.
We all prayed and hoped that they would get out.
Walton: So there was public pressure to name this individual,
but we knew that if we were to name Emwazi,
there was a high risk that he would conduct more murders
and more beheadings of hostages.
In James Foley's video,
obviously Steven Sotloff was featured at the end.
Emwazi: The life of this American citizen, Obama,
depends on your next decision.
And then the next video, it's my dad,
and the one after it was Alan.
Emwazi: If you, Cameron, persist
in fighting the Islamic State,
then you, like your master Obama,
will have the blood of your people on your hands.
At the time that Jihadi John had killed his third hostage,
all you're able to see then, is that this is the third,
and how many more of these are there going to be?
What terrorists want above all is a reaction,
and ISIS, and in particular Jihadi John and his mates,
spent the summer of 2014 seeking a reaction.
You had this sequence of increasingly grisly videos.
They were very, very skillful propaganda.
They recreated the medieval barbarity of the 7th century
with these great bladed weapons,
the beheadings, it was all on the sands of the desert
and the world's media I am afraid fell for it.
And of course, with the level of interest
and the level of coverage,
the level of fear went up as well.
Images were released showing the beheading
of American journalist James Foley.
Today the entire world is appalled.
It is an act of murder.
The video is too graphic for us to show.
And it also speaks to how barbaric
and gruesome this can all be.
Reporter: All eyes are on his eyes.
Again speaking in English with a British accent.
I recognized John, for sure.
The John I met there,
( mumbles )
I recognized his voice.
I recognize his style.
People across this country
would have been sickened by the fact
that it could have been a British citizen,
a British citizen who could have carried out
this unspeakable act.
Somebody must have decided
that allowing Emwazi who was relatively junior,
to be filmed executing hostages
was going to be a good and powerful idea.
And if you look at Emwazi as an adversary,
he certainly wasn't a glorious battlefield commander,
he wasn't that.
He wasn't high in the ISIS hierarchy such as it was,
but he was a powerful
and credible adversary nonetheless.
Why?
He was from us.
He was of us.
And so, he knew us instinctively.
Emwazi: The blood of David Haines is on your hands Cameron.
Alan Henning will also be slaughtered,
but his blood is on the hand of the British parliament.
With each video there was a sense
of this is getting slightly out of control.
How is it that we're losing the power dynamic here?
Verkaik: This is Emwazi telling the world about not just
what the Islamic State think of America and Britain,
this is Mohammed Emwazi telling the world
what he thinks about Britain and America.
This is his very own personal message,
and the venomous tone and the snarling attacks
on Obama and Cameron, I think, are very much Mohammed Emwazi.
( Mohammed Emwazi speaking )
Emwazi: I'm back, Obama,
and I'm back because of your arrogant foreign policy
towards the Islamic State.
And politicians will always want to try and present
the situation as one of being in control,
but we clearly weren't in control.
Man: I think those awful images cut right through
to the American public in the relative sanctuary
we felt emotionally before 9/11,
and then we had 9/11 and it was like,
oh, this was such a shock, and then the war in Afghanistan,
and then Iraq.
So you have a war-weary American public,
and then this horrific scene of an American man murdered
for the world to see, so I think it really had America
torn about what to go do.
If you threaten America, you will find no safe haven.
The next ISIS video comes out,
the next ISIS beheading comes out.
Jihadi John's on TV again.
"Bakr Al Baghdadi said this."
You know all these...
So there was just this wave of information.
It seemed like we were losing.
Now I tell you we never were losing in my mind,
but it sure did seem that way at a few points.
Civil society will be asking its government,
well why is this happening and why can't you stop it,
and what does it mean for our relationships
with our fellow citizens of different faiths.
So whatever the substance of these issues,
this is just one man doing brutal things
in another part of the world.
The effect on politics and society is profound.
Hannigan: The prime minister made it very clear
that we had a responsibility to these British citizens.
He took it as a high priority
and instructed us to take it as a high priority.
For us at GCHQ, this was a largely desk screen-based campaign.
In Afghanistan we could climb up towers
and do all the things we need to do on the ground.
None of that was possible in Raqqa.
If you looked at a picture of Raqqa,
you would see these little V-Sat terminals,
so these little satellite dishes all over the roofs.
And they were connecting direct to the internet in practice,
and that's the way that people were communicating.
They were not using telephone company, GSM networks, because they didn't trust them.
Warren: Mohammed Emwazi, look, he'd been reading the newspaper
and watching TV just like the rest of us.
He knows that we're coming after him.
He went to great lengths to prevent being captured.
He was an interesting case
because he had studied computer science
and he had been in the IT business.
He had clearly taught himself a lot.
He understood, therefore, the best way
to avoid surveillance and was good at it.
He communicated very rarely, and when he did,
mostly around the hostages,
he used a whole series of commercially available products
to obscure his identity, including very strong encryption,
and including virtual private networks.
Any one of those products would be very, very difficult
for an agency to tackle.
What he was doing was layering them on top of each other.
Any agency's ambition, if they can find the machine
that a terrorist is using, is to put something on to it
which will stay there and communicate back
what that person is doing.
What Emwazi was able to do was to ensure
that every time he switched off his machine
it was wiped of anything and everything,
and that made it extremely difficult
and very, very time consuming to do anything really
with his communications.
It's never straightforward
and it can take a very, very long time
and in this case, of course, it did take a long time.
Obama, you have started your aerial bombardment in Sham,
which keeps on striking our people.
So it's only right we continue
to strike the necks of your people.
Warren: Every single time he would do something,
we would see a significant spike in social media activity
surrounding ISIS.
We would see a significant spike
in recruiting success for ISIS.
Know that you can't fight any of those things
with bombs and bullets.
Those types of things had to be fought with information.
And this was my responsibility,
to try to counter his atrocities.
You have here an ordinary young British man
who left London and went into Syria.
Who is now appearing on the TV,
slaughtering people's life.
Obviously, this had a huge impact on many young Muslims,
so that, "Wow, I am sitting here in London,"
or "I'm sitting here in Birmingham,
I am sitting here in Manchester,"
and that he is out there doing the fight.
Not only he is doing it, but doing it in a way
that is very much a Hollywood way of dramatizing things.
Jesse Morton: That attracted the concern of non-Muslims
that are also looking for a reason to denounce Islam.
If anybody wants to point to Islam as a religion
that breeds barbarity, it's Jihadi John.
It's a complete perfect example, as I was back in the day.
But this was an exorbitant level of violence.
This was a level of violence unseen before.
Mamadou Bocum: What Jihadi John did, in my opinion,
for the first time helped ordinary Muslims
to say, "Wow there is something that is not right."
I think these things always escalate,
so they started very brutal anyway, frankly,
the first execution video,
although it stopped short of showing the actual beheading,
was horrific in its own way.
But as time went on, for whatever reason,
they must have decided to take that self-censorship away
and just push it all out.
Clearly it did escalate up,
and the killing of the Jordanian pilot by fire
was particularly gruesome.
The turning point really was when they burned the pilot.
The prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him,
famously taught that only the lord of fire
can punish with fire.
El-Badawy: The burning of anything in Islam
that is a living being was completely forbidden,
and most Muslims would know that basic principal.
It was shot in a style that was pioneered by Emwazi,
and it's actually believed he was there
while it was being filmed.
And so this was a complete eye opening moment
where if anybody ever had an ounce of sympathy
that was Muslim for this group,
it was impossible to still continue
to believe that this group represented Islam.
( speaking in foreign language )
Translator: ...a criminal gang that has no relation
to our noble religion.
El-Badawy: The video of the pilot
illustrated the hubris of the group,
and it ultimately undermined the effectiveness
of the ISIS propaganda machine.
We will redouble the vigilance,
and determination on the part of a global coalition
to make sure that they are degraded and ultimately defeated.
By being able to engage in something so unthinkable
you attracted worldwide media,
you were in the media stream every day,
you were the complete concentration
of the entire international community,
you also made it much easier for people
to accept the fact that the state you claim to be defending
should be dismantled and should be bombed from above
and should incorporate a coalition against you.
So as a former propagandist,
I would say it was completely counterproductive.
Wise: What did Mohammed Emwazi mean
to those who were fighting the fight
against the Islamic State.
This hunt for Jihadi John was personal
and his nationality mattered not one wit.
For us, this was as personal
as if he'd been an American citizen.
What we needed to do was find, fix and finish Emwazi.
A very, very important target, and ultimately, of course,
as they say in the manhunt business,
ended up on the X.
Very broadly, there are three phases.
The first is just gathering intelligence about this person,
based on that, there is then a phase
in which you hope to build up a pattern of life.
You need a certain regularity to understand their behavior,
where they are going to be on a particular day.
You also need to make decisions
about the deployment of aerial assets
'cause so much of this is about reconnaissance from above.
Warren: We start to realize,
we think we know exactly where he is.
So have a drone take a look at that spot.
( drones humming )
We'd been very clear that...
we'd intended to minimize civilian casualties
as we prosecuted this fight against ISIS.
Jihadi John was able to read between the lines
and he understood that if he surrounded himself
with civilians, with non-combatants,
that we would be very reticent to try to strike at him.
Wise: And this boy knew if he had any hope for survival
he had to blend in to the citizens of Raqqa.
He had to look from a distance just like them.
It's no longer looking for a needle in a haystack,
this is like looking for a needle in a stack of needles.
Hannigan: You have to remember that these terrorists
are leading lives alongside their terrorist operations.
Where we could see what they were doing,
they were doing very much what young men
of their generation would do so,
so be looking at football and porn and films,
but in amongst that was attack planning
and violent extremist material and, of course,
fueling their own impact,
seeing their own kind of celebrity being created,
that must have been intoxicating.
Warren: So the net slowly, slowly, slowly begins to tighten.
Finally, yesterday he was here
and now we have good reason to believe that tomorrow
he's gonna be there, and that's the tipping point.
Once we start talking about where do we think he's gonna be
that in my mind is when I know, okay,
we're locked in on him now.
I think where you have any target,
who is very good at communication security
they are almost always made vulnerable by others
that they communicate with, so those around them.
Verkaik: Throughout his life,
Mohammed Emwazi had wanted a family,
he pursued two engagements, one woman in London,
one in Kuwait, it was the one desire,
which he continued to pursue in Syria.
It turned out to be his greatest weakness.
You know his family was a little bit
of a vulnerability right?
He had his, I think, ISIS issued wife that he got
when he was in Syria.
And he knew that he was a target,
and he'd taken appropriate action,
but the one thing he couldn't do,
the one thing he wasn't prepared to do,
was to not spend time with his family.
Once he had established a family in Raqqa,
they knew where to find him.
They didn't need to track him 24/7.
They just had to watch the family,
and similarly, wait for him to turn up.
Warren: He was very careful about his actions,
but you know what, they all slip up eventually.
Every one of these guys, to a one,
including the most famous one Osama Bin Laden,
they all make a mistake and when they do,
we kill them.
( clock ticking )
( plane engines roaring )
So eventually, we acquire our target.
We're fairly certain that it's Jihadi John,
and we see him, along with some colleagues.
enter into a vehicle.
So the location is Raqqa.
We believed at the time that he was heading to the city center,
and this goes on for some time.
He's driving around for, I don't know,
it might have been 45, it was a while.
Inside of that ops center,
the hunt for Jihadi John was fairly routine.
For me personally, I was more invested.
You know, he was my foe.
I had been trading blows with him for months at this point.
So you know, as we're following him around
and what we're really looking for is an opportunity to strike him.
You might be able to see an area,
but perhaps the missile can't negotiate
around the various buildings or population density.
So, we're trying to find the opportune time
to take the shot.
Because remember, if you shoot and miss
well guess what, now he knows.
Now he knows that we're shooting at him.
And sure enough, eventually he moves his vehicle
into a relatively open area.
In fact, ISIS had used previously for executions,
sort of a little poetic justice I guess.
His vehicle stops and we see a figure exit the vehicle.
We don't know what he's doing, but we did know that
this is not a bad little location here.
He steps out of the vehicle,
and now we have an opportunity
to really try to triple check that this is Jihadi John.
Because of the conditions, it was night,
we're using infrared, you can't see his face.
But we could sort of see how he moved,
the cut of his jib, so to speak.
You know, the angle of his beard.
You know, these things we could see.
Eventually we were convinced
that this is Jihadi John.
And so,
the floor commander at the time orders,
take the shot.
Man: He's left the vehicle.
Man 2: Roger. Let's see what he does.
Man: Wait... ( distorted radio chatter )
- Man: Ready to engage. - Man 2: Standby.
- Man: Engage. - Man 2: Roger.
Man: Fire, hit it.
Warren: And then that missile's in flight
and the missile can fly anywhere from I don't know
five to 15 seconds and that really
is kind the most tense moment
because now that missile's gone you can't take it back.
And so you have these moments, it's all done
and you don't know what's gonna happen next.
( bomb exploding )
Wise: You might ask you know, was there high fiving
and celebration after this
and counterintuitively the answer is no.
This is the serious business
of eradicating an existential threat
by taking a human life.
I don't rejoice in anyone's death,
but it was certainly a good thing
that he was no longer able to do the really brutal
and disgusting things that we'd seen on video.
And yes, you could argue that Emwazi's departure
lethally and instantaneously
was perhaps unsatisfying.
It wasn't a 10-minute execution.
He didn't have to feel the cut of the steel.
I had a mixed feeling.
Of course I would have preferred to see him in court...
facing his charges...
and being blamed for
and answering for the crimes he committed.
It was mixed feeling, but the main feeling though
was the satisfaction,
the relief at least,
this person will not harm anyone anymore.
But... yeah in that instant, I was well aware
that there were plenty of other people who would step into his shoes,
it would have been, um...
strange to see this as a massive breakthrough.
It was...
a part of one particular story,
but the ISIL threat went on.
We're going to have to live with a level
of extreme Islamist violence
for some time to come, and it will continue
to inspire people in Western countries.
Wise: What you have are horrendous terrorist acts
all attributed to ISIS.
Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi had not a clue
that any of those things were going to happen,
but he didn't have to, what they got was inspiration
and that's all they needed.
News reporter: U.S.-led airstrikes are hitting the heart
of ISIS-controlled territory in Syria.
A coalition of nations has come together,
and Britain has to do its share.
News reporter: Day four of withering air strikes on ISIS targets.
News reporter 2: Proclamations of victory over the group
in both Iraq and Syria.
News Reporter 3: A secret deal reportedly allowed
some of the most notorious ISIS fighters
to escape from a besieged Syrian city.
They made an agreement so that they didn't
literally have to destroy Raqqa to save it.
I'm sure that was the least bad of the options.
Now what you're seeing already is the remnants
of these forces turning into insurgent groups.
These are elusive enemies now,
they are no longer wearing uniforms or flying black flags,
they are hiding among the population.
So this is going to be a very different threat.
I'm very confident that ultimately
Baghdadi will find himself on the X as well.
News reporter: Once some of the world's most wanted,
but now nobody wants them.
The last two of the British ISIS cell dubbed The Beatles
jailed in Syria.
How they'll face justice
is now a matter of hot debate.
Accused of waterboarding, crucifixion,
accessory to beheadings of Western hostages.
The Beatles, they are obsessed with their own self-image.
They have gone from capturing western journalists
to now trying to capture western journalists' attention,
turning their stories around as if they were victims,
and it's caused quite an interesting reaction
to what do we do with people like that.
Henin: I would expect to attend that trial
and what is of prime importance to me
is that this trial is fair.
We should not give them any chance
to portray themselves as victims.
We are the victim.
They are the perpetrators, they are the terrorists.
So much effort was spent on the fanaticism
that had led Jihadi John to go kill innocent people.
If you look at the amazing lives of his victims,
these lives are great examples of the power of networks
and people joining causes higher than themselves
and that use of networking and the higher cause,
I think, often is drowned out by the grisly
and the dark and the sensational.
I never, ever told my dad how proud I was of him
and it's only now when he's not here
that I realize how proud I actually was.
When David was always talking to his daughters.
He'd have his time...
when he just wanted to speak to his daughters.
Federico and I,
we were kind of forced together through this.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we speak... um... often.
She's remarkably like her father...
in temperament and many ways.
I definitely see a lot of David in her.
When people tell me I'm a lot like my dad,
I used to always think, I don't believe it, I don't believe it.
So when he says, "Oh, you're so much like your dad,"
it really does ring true, and you think,
Well, I must be doing something right.
Walton: There was a sense in which Emwazi
had fulfilled his ambitions,
but there was also some self-analysis by us
as to whether we'd actually had the right strategy
for this individual.
On the one hand, we had absolutely
understood the threat he posed,
but ultimately, we failed because he became what he wanted to be,
potentially one of the worst terrorists of all time.
To think that the level of-- of hatred
that must have been generated
over that short number of years
was such that it would have inspired him
to behave in a way that he did,
I find that incredible,
that's not the same person that-- that I knew.
He was a guy who had it all.
British passport, safety and security,
all the benefits of British society.
He had a future, and he gave it up for the Islamic State.
Ultimately it's a battle of ideas,
and I am confident that good ideas with the right support
will demonstrate that bad ideas are nihilistic,
they destroy themselves and others.
Somebody put it very strikingly.
They said the terrorist is like the fly in the china shop.
Now he can't destroy the china shop on his own.
The fly isn't nearly strong enough,
but if he gets inside the ear of a bull
then the bull if it panics will destroy the china shop.
We're the bull, they are the fly,
that's why it's important not to panic.
We need to have the courage to have a higher standard.
We must not debase ourselves to the level of hatred
that they have.
And as part of Jim's legacy,
we want to inspire young people to care
and do good things in the world.
We need that goodness.