Born: 1995;

Place of Birth: Coventry, United Kingdom;

Gender: Male;

Nationality: British;

General Info:
Zakariya Ashiq is a fanatical young British Muslim was today jailed for six years for making determined efforts to join the Islamic State in Syria to fulfill his ambition of becoming a martyr.

Ashiq left the UK last year on a bus from London Victoria station and travelled via Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Bulgaria to Jordan.

But when the 25-year-old from Coventry failed to cross the border to reach his intended destination of Syria, he flew back to London Heathrow where he was arrested in November.

Ashiq admitted trying to get to Syria but claimed he had to leave the UK because he was being ‘pestered’ by MI5 and ‘tortured’ by unidentified shadowy figures.

He said he repeatedly met MI5 operatives who ‘harassed’ him to help them, and claimed to have been ‘waterboarded’ on several occasions by men in balaclavas who bundled him into the back of a white van in Coventry.

Ashiq was described by Paul Hynes QC, defending, as a Walter Mitty character whose evidence about being waterboarded displayed elements of a ‘fantastical tale’.

Ashiq remained determined to fight for the Islamic State despite knowing it was responsible for beheading hostages, including British aid worker Alan Henning, he said.

The court had heard about WhatsApp conversations Ashiq had with two friends who had gone to Syria before him last year.

In them, Ashiq described to Ali Kalantar and Mohammed Ismail hitch-hiking and sleeping in mosques during his journey across Europe to join them.

He appealed to them for help to get into Syria, saying the second he got the chance he would do ‘Ishtishadi (martyrdom) against any… all these people’, the jury was told.

In one message, he pleaded: ‘Oh, seriously man, just get me there, man … I don’t know how you gonna get me, but you have to get me across.’

Ashiq’s extremist sympathies were also exposed in other WhatsApp messages read out to the jury. In one he wrote: ‘There is no life, there’s no life without Jihad.’

He also spoke of his admiration for Islamic State using the online website Chat Roulette, the court heard.

And he searched on his computer for phrases such as ‘Islamic State beheading journalist’ and ‘44 ways to support Jihad’ and Islamic preacher Anjem Choudary.

He went to Turkey with his father in March last year, just days after Kalantar and Ismail flew out to Istanbul via Frankfurt.

During the trip, purportedly to visit refugee camps on the Syrian border, the pair fell out and Ashiq flew home on May 20.

Then, in July, he tried to go abroad again and told officers he was intending to go to Corfu and had no time for terrorists or their beliefs.