LONDON — When Mohammed Emwazi went to the mosque, a short walk north from Notting Hill and its millionaire mansions, he would sometimes run into another young Muslim from the housing projects in his neighborhood in northwest London, Bilal al-Berjawi.
Both men were part of a loose network of young Muslims in the mid-2000s, some with friendships going back to childhood, others with little more in common than a shared Arab and African heritage that set them apart from other British Muslims, most of whose families had come from Pakistan. Over time, some of the young men — Mr. Emwazi and Mr. Berjawi foremost among them — would become deeply alienated from Britain and Western society.
With the news that Mr. Emwazi is one of the most notorious members of the Islamic State — better known as Jihadi John, the hooded figure featured in many of the group’s videos showing the beheadings of hostages — that loose group of young men has emerged as the latest example of a breeding ground for Islamic radicals in Europe.
Mohammed Emwazi, 26, who was recently identified as the ISIS militant known as “Jihadi John,” encountered British security forces on his path to radicalization.
The North London Boys, as the network is sometimes called, has sent dozens of young men to fight, first in Somalia and more recently in Syria. Mr. Berjawi, who trained with Al Qaeda in East Africa and then rose through the ranks of the Shabab, its Somali offshoot, was killed by an American drone strike in Somalia in 2012 after being stripped of his British citizenship. So was Mr. Berjawi’s close friend, Mohamed Sakr, the older brother of one of Mr. Emwazi’s classmates and friends.
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It was also in 2013, around the same time as Mr. Emwazi disappeared, that an amateur rapper who grew up just a few streets away left to fight in Syria. That man, Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, is the son of Adel Abdul Bary, an Egyptian who pleaded guilty in New York last year to terrorism charges related to Al Qaeda’s bombings in East Africa and was Osama bin Laden’s spokesman in London in the 1990s. In August last year, his son posted the notorious photo of himself with a severed head, alongside the words “Chillin’ with my other homie, or what’s left of him.”
Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura contributed reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on March 1, 2015, on page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Fertile Ground For Militancy In Hometown Of Jihadi John . Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
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