Raqib Ruhul Amin
Two days ago, I had a phone conversation with a journalist at a local Scottish paper. She wanted some general background for a piece she was writing on Raqib Ruhul Amin, the Aberdeen-born IS recruit who, we now learn, was, killed by an RAF Reaper drone on 21st of August.
In the relatively short space of time between the phone call I got from the University media office (I work at the University of St Andrews, partly on jihadi-salafism) and the interview with the journalist, I thought about what she might want to know. It interested me that we were going to be talking specifically about this man, because – based on my scan of the news that morning – there seemed to be an odd silence about him. We know that the attack that killed him was specifically targeting Reyaad Khan, a jihadist from Cardiff; and that a previous attack had also killed Junaid Hussain, another British IS member. But unlike these two, news reports had been oddly silent about why Ruhul Amin had been killed.
