The Portsmouth terrorist cell refers to five Bangladeshi British men from Portsmouth, England who came to Syria to join the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant in October 2013. They had been recruited by another Portsmouth man, Ifthekar Jaman, who had traveled to Syria in May. Jaman was killed a few months later, and only one member of the Portsmouth cell survived.
The men were Assad Uzzaman, 25, Muhammad Hamidur Rahman, 25, Mamunur Mohammed Roshid, 24, Mashudur Choudhury, 31, and Muhammad Mehdi Hassan, 19. They called himselves the "al-Britani Brigade Bangladeshi Bad Boys" and some in the press called them the "Pompey lads".
In the months before the group traveled, the five men had all been active in the Portsmouth Dawah Team, distributing pamphlets and copies of the Quran. All had attended the Jami Mosque in Portsmouth. Jaman had also been on the Portsmouth Dawah team and knew all of the men; Uzzaman was his cousin.
Uzzaman worked at Lloyds Bank. Muhammad Hamidur Rahman worked at Primark. Hassan was attending sixth form college repeating one of his A-levels. He had gotten two A's and one B before, but wanted straight A's. He had attended the Catholic St John's College in Hampshire, excelled academically and had plans to study international politics at the University of Surrey. His mother said the family was middle-class and Hassan had a "beautiful, prosperous future ahead of him".
Choudhury, the oldest of the men, was married with two children and had worked as a racial harassment caseworker and part-time as a development worker in the Muslim community. A member of the Portsmouth City Council later said Choudhury "embellished" both roles. He had trouble in his personal life; he would later be described as a "serial liar". He had once pretended to have stomach cancer, then took the ã35,000 his family gave him for medical treatment in Singapore and spent it on prostitutes. He said his failings and his lies had made him "utterly ashamed and embarrassed". He texted his wife in 2013 and suggested they move to Syria, and she replied, "I hate you. You want to die in battlefield, go die. I really mean it, just go." She later said she didn't literally mean that he should go to die in the Syrian civil war, and that she didn't consider his statements about Syria to be serious because she saw him as a fantasist and incapable of fighting.
In May 2013, Jaman quit his job and left the UK alone, saying he was going to the Middle East to study Arabic and possibly help with refugees from the Syrian civil war. He went to Syria and joined ISIL after being rejected from Al-Nusra Front. Jaman posted photos and videos of his life in Syria on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, calling it "five star jihad" and encouraging Muslims, including his friends back in England, to come to Syria. He recruited his friends back in Portsmouth in October 2013.
The five men left on the pretense that they were taking a trip to Turkey. Hassan told his mother he would only be gone for three months and told her to instruct his college he would return to take his exams. Days before he left, he posted on Twitter, "The true Muslim is always a problem for the kuffar. He can never be defeated. He is not afraid of death, torture, imprisonment nor exile." Rahman told his family he was going to travel to the Syrian border region as part of a humanitarian aid convoy, and tweeted that he felt "called by God to help Muslims being killed by President Bashar al-Assad."
They flew out of Gatwick Airport and traveled to Reyhanli, a Turkish town on the Syrian border where they met with a group of three other British men who were from Manchester, one of whom was Raphael Hostey. Jaman had asked the Portsmouth group to meet the Manchester group and vet them. After meeting one another, the two groups contacted Jaman, who helped them cross the border into Syria.
Mashudur Choudhury returned to Britain shortly after his arrival in Syria. He said after witnessing the war-torn situation, he changed his mind and asked the Syrians to get him out of ISIL territory while the younger men went to join an ISIL military training camp. He was arrested when he landed at Gatwick Airport. In May 2014 he was convicted of engaging in conduct in preparation of terrorist acts; his was the first British conviction for a terror offense related to the Syrian civil war. He admitted he lied to make people feel sorry for him and said he never intended to actually fight in Syria, only to have a better life and escape his personal failings back in the UK. Choudhury was sentenced to four years, with half to be served in prison and half in the community.
Ifthekar Jaman was killed by a tank near the city of Deir ez-Zor in December 2013, a few months after the arrival of the recruits from Portsmouth and Manchester. Muhammad Hamidur Rahman was killed in Deir ez-Zor in July 2014. Someone claiming to be another fighter informed his family in England by text; Rahman was supposedly shot dead in a gunfight with pro-Assad forces.
Muhammad Mehdi Hassan adopted the nom de guerre "Abu Dujana" in Syria. He kept in touch with his family, calling home every few months. His family felt he wanted to return to the UK, and at one point his mother went to meet him in the town of Urfa at the Turkish-Syrian border, but Hassan never showed up. His family believes he may have been caught trying to cross into Turkey and jailed by IS. Once he hosted a question-and-answer session on Facebook for friends back home. He was also active on Twitter until October 17, 2014; his last tweet read, "Between 20-40 us strikes daily in ayn al arab [the Syrian town of Kobane]. Alhamdulillah they are spending $10's of billions...against themselves."
ISIL was in an offensive to capture Kobane at the time. Hassan was killed during that offensive; he was shot by a PKK sniper and bled to death in the hospital. A photo of his body later appeared on Twitter and his family identified it. His family released a statement saying they had no idea Hassan had planned to go to Syria and that they had a "good heart" and wanted to "help Syrians." Hassan would later be featured in a 2021 documentary, Secrets of an ISIS Smartphone.
Mamunur Roshid was killed that same month, on October 17, the same day Hassan posted his last tweet. By this point, at least five British people were traveling to Iraq and Syria to join ISIL every week.
Assad Uzzaman, who took the nom de guerre "Abu Abdullah" in Syria, was killed in July 2015. The last time his family heard from him was on July 6, when he texted them and asked to talk to his mother, saying if she called him back he "would be able to speak, inshallah". His mother was not able to call him back and Uzzaman's family never heard from him again. Photos of his body circulated on social media after his death.
Flick Drummond went to visit Uzzaman's family after news of his death broke and said they were "heartbroken" and that she would work with the Foreign Office to find out the details of his death and whether his remains could be repatriated. Drummond said, "Many people will have strong views about what Assad has done, but he was a much-loved son from a family who were completely integrated with British society with no extremist sympathies whatsoever." She described Uzzaman and the other Portsmouth men who joined him in Syria as "well meaning," saying, "These were all highly educated young men who chose to go down this course before they knew the true nature" of ISIL.
In October 2015, Jaman's brothers, Mustakim Jaman and Tuhin Shahensha, were both convicted of preparing terrorist acts for providing assistance for the group of five Portsmouth men in traveling to Syria, including using their bank accounts to transfer money. Jurors at their first trial, in May, had been unable to reach a verdict. Tuhin was also convicted of preparing to travel to Syria himself. A counterterrorism police officer said the brothers had not had plans to attack the UK. They were sentenced to six years each in prison.
Mustakim Jaman later changed his name to Isaac Idris. In 2021, he was jailed again for eight months after pleading guilty to eleven breaches of a Part 4 Terrorist Notification Order under Section 54 of the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008, including failing to tell police details of his finances, his phone number and his email addresses.