[ by Charles Cameron — wanna know the very latest on those black banners from Khorasan? ]
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Here’s the scene that greeted four British recruits to the jihad on their arrival at a training camp in Pakistan in August 2011:

This wasn’t like the training camps of propaganda videos, with the black flag of al-Qaeda flying free in the wind. There were no racks of weapons waiting for recruits. And all the trainers had left for the religious festival of Eid.

They came home to the UK, where their families “berated” them, they were arrested, tried, found guilty and sentenced to 40 month terms in prison.

With jihad, as with so much else, you can’t always count on truth in advertising.

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And then there’s Omar Hammami.

Even Rusty Shackleford from My Pet Jawa — “a weblog comparing Muslims to Jawas and containing criticism and satire of Islamic traditions and beliefs” — can’t help but like Omar Hammami, aka Abu Mansoor Al-Amriki, the American jihadist from Alabama who, as Wired puts it, “shoots the breeze” on Twitter “with the people whose job it is to study and even hunt people like him.” He does it with verve, even when ridiculing al-Shabab, the group he was put on the the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist List with a $5 million bounty for joining:

Shackleford commented, “I’ve actually become kinda fond of the guy — if that’s possible”.

Al-Shabab, however, appears to dislike him enough to have tried to assassinate him a couple of days ago, following up their failure with a major attack, results as yet unknown.

With jihad in foreign lands, apparently, you can’t even trust your fellow mujahidin to treat you better than your avowed enemies.