Islamic leaders launch campaign to stop Britons enlisting with regime

War on terrorism: British Muslims

British Muslims leaders unveiled a campaign yesterday to discourage young men from joining the Taliban, as one young Briton, currently imprisoned by the opposition Northern Alliance, claimed he had been forced to fight for the organisation.

The self-styled Islamic Parliament of Great Britain said it planned to tour the UK shortly to warn third and fourth-generation British Pakistanis that they risked the same fate as Anwar Khan, a 25-year-old from Burnley, Lancashire. Mr Khan was drawn into a Taliban training camp, where he became fascinated with its weaponry, only to end up fighting the opposition Panjshiris, who captured him and have imprisoned him for the past three years.

Mr Khan says he was sent by his family to Pakistan in October 1998 in an effort to help him overcome his drug addiction and cut short a life of crime. Separated from his 27-year-old wife, Zorah, and three-year-old son Hamza, he was sent to a strict Islamic school to relearn the Koran. It was there that he encountered pro-Taliban extremists and later joined a Taliban training camp in Kabul.

"I had a Kalashnikov thrust into my hands and was on a rifle range learning how to use it," he said. "Then I moved on to anti-aircraft missiles. I couldn't believe the firepower I was being taught to handle."

He ended up on the front line, against his will, where he was captured in February 1999. "I feared we would be shot straight away but because we laid down our arms we were spared," he said.

The Islamic Parliament's leader, Dr Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, said the parental practice of sending wayward sons back to native Pakistan villages often backfired.

"The idea is that keeping them away from this country will help but the same problems can exist," he said.

"However the Taliban might be encountered, we are now endeavouring to quell its appeal to the young," he added.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4's Today programme from his cell – believed to be in the Lachiday prison on the north-east Pakistan border – Mr Khan said: "I went to a free camp, where you could come and go, but for me it wasn't go because I was gripped by the wrist and sent to the foreign lands." He said he was attracted to the Taliban for the "firearms" rather than religion and that he neither wanted to, nor had been, recruited by Osama bin Laden.

"I don't want to be recruited, Mr Khan said, "I just want to get out of this mess and go home."

Mr Khan's chequered past includes an assault conviction in Hong Kong, after he and three others attacked a taxi driver in January 1994. Mr Khan unsuccessfully fought extradition to Hong Kong to face charges over the incident.

The Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, said Mr Khan had been portrayed as "a kind of terrorist" which was "really ... stretching it".

"[He's] got problems with drugs, goes over there, expresses a desire to do what a lot of army cadets do, a bit of physical exercise in the military, in military circumstances," he said.

Peter Pike, the MP for Burnley, has raised Mr Khan's case with the Foreign Office on several occasions.