In his death, aged 23, Jaman became the most modern of martyrs: immortalised and venerated by the dozens of viewers who watched his artless, engaging videos online on Ustream and Keek; the hundreds who shared his Instagram photos; and the thousands on Twitter who retweeted his patter, aphorisms and religious dogma in 140 characters or less. For more than a year before he went to Syria and the seven months he was there, Jaman laid bare his beliefs, hopes and ambitions on social media.
Months later, his Twitter account still has more than 3,000 followers. In the short period he used it, he tweeted nearly 10,000 times, sometimes dozens of times a day. He was deeply engaged with the war in Syria, and with a broad network of followers at home in the UK – and he used Twitter just like any other social media-savvy member of Generation Y.
Jaman embodied a phenomenon that is not only baffling the west’s security services, but alarming them too: the burgeoning of radical Islamism through social media across Europe, which is radicalising thousands of young Muslims, dissolving borders, connecting them with banned terror organisations and propelling them towards violence in the most bloody conflict since the second world war.
