Suicide bombers force soul-searching in British town

Ten years after the ringleader of the London bombings set out from his Dewsbury home to blow up a train, the small English town is again grasping for answers after a local teen-turned-suicide bomber staged a deadly attack in Iraq.
As Britain marks the anniversary tomorrow of the attacks which killed 52 people, many in Dewsbury's tight-knit Muslim community blame the Internet for radicalisation, and eye government anti-extremism projects with suspicion.
A recent speech by Prime Minister David Cameron in which he accused some British Muslims of "quietly condoning" jihadist actions has sparked outrage in the town.
"What Cameron said has angered people," Madiha Ansari, a local resident who has set up a literature club for vulnerable youths, told AFP.

"It's like asking middle-aged white males to apologise for paedophilia," interrupted her younger brother Bilal.
"No, no, no," she responded. "This is how the community is reacting, they are reacting negatively to a negative comment, we should be positive."

Dewsbury's problems are a microcosm of those faced across the country, said Ansari, with cities from Portsmouth to Coventry asking how hundreds of their citizens ended up dying on foreign jihadist battlefields.
Despite a decade of soul-searching over how local man Mohammad Sidique Khan became the leader of a foursome of suicide bombers that attacked London on July 7, 2005, the town seems no closer to agreeing on how to combat homegrown extremism.

The debate has intensified in recent days following reports last month that a 17-year-old from Dewsbury, Talha Asmal, had become Britain's youngest suicide bomber, killing 11 people near an Iraqi oil works.
His neighbourhood friend Hassan Munshi is still believed to be fighting alongside Islamic State militants.
Some point the finger at local mosques, with Dewsbury's Zakaria mosque, where both Munshi and Asmal worshipped, coming under the microscope.
The mosque sits modestly among the sandstone terraced houses of Savile Town, the bustling epicentre of Dewsbury's 20,000-strong Muslim population.
Around the corner is the huge Markazi mosque, the home outside Saudi Arabia of the Tablighi Jamaat movement, where Khan, the eldest of the 2005 attackers, worshipped.

Between 97 and 99 per cent of Savile Town's residents are Muslim, most of them descended from Indian and Pakistani immigrants who began arriving in the 1950s when it was still a centre for the wool industry.