War zone ‘hero’ who is back for Christmas
WOULD you want to live next door to Jamie Read? I’ m not sure I would. On Tuesday, the 24-yearold former soldier arrived back at Heathrow after spending a month in Kobane with the Kurdish army, fighting Islamic State.
Following a six-hour interview by police, he headed back to his home in Newmains in Lanarkshire and into the welcoming arms of his girlfriend Leeann Fleming.
‘I was raging,’ he said of his interview at Heathrow. ‘They kept asking why we went, who we were with and if we were being paid.’
Aw, diddums. Imagine the audacity of the British authorities, wanting to know why one of their own citizens has spent the last month wielding guns for a foreign army in the world’s most dangerous war zone.
Which is not to say that Mr Read isn’t keen to share his tales of dashing derring- do on the Kobane front line. Indeed, since landing back in Scotland he has spent most of his time trying to flog his story for a five-figure sum.
Is Mr Read’s ego so monumental that he is completely blind to the concerns and complexities of the situation? Does he really believe that his mission is so noble, so grandiose, that it should be above suspicion when, at the same time, the authorities are doing everything possible to stop the return of radicalised British jihadists intent on waging war on British soil?
Read, who spent a remarkable amount of his time in the Middle East posting pictures of himself on Facebook posing with guns and mirrored sunglasses, said he wanted to ‘avenge’ the beheading of Alan Henning, the Manchester taxi driver murdered by IS fighters.
Yet the tragedy is that if Read, or any of his fellow Western fighters, were to be caught by IS, they, too, would end up on their knees in the sand in an orange jumpsuit, and the terrorists would have scored themselves another huge victory in the propaganda war.
Whatever Read’s reasons for upping sticks to fight a war on the other side of the world (and it is intriguing that, intent as he is on ‘avenging’, he’s still managed to pop home in time for Christmas), the fact that he’s allowed to waltz back into the UK with little in the way of recrimination is troubling.
Meanwhile, by making such a song and dance about his adventures on social media, he has made himself a terrorist target. I bet the residents of Newmains are just thrilled about that.