Secrets of an ISIS Smartphone, review: how did these men end up as murderous extremists?

The footage is surreal: a bunch of young men larking about in the swimming pool of a luxury villa. But we’re a long way from Love Island. Next to the pool there’s an AK-47. These men aren’t on holiday, but have left their homes in Britain to join ISIS.

The men – boys, really – were Fatlum Shalaku, Choukri Ellekhlifi and Medhi Hassan. The video was found on a phone recovered by a Sunday Times journalist in 2019. By then, the trio were long dead. Secrets of an ISIS Smartphone (BBC Three/BBC One) investigated how they ended up as murderous extremists. And they were not the only ones: an estimated 900 Britons made the same choice, the show told us.

Investigative journalist Mobeen Azhar trawled the trio’s social media accounts and tried to set up interviews with their families and friends. Shalaku and Ellekhlifi were from an area of west London where violent crime was rife. Hassan was a privately educated kid whose radicalisation was so swift that he went “from a bar-going gym bunny to a keyboard warrior in six months”.

None of this was new, but it will have been to many, including BBC Three’s young target audience, and the film provided some illumination. An academic explained how ISIS execution videos were slickly made in the style of video games and horror films, which serve to dehumanise victims and reel in impressionable young men.

There are two hallmarks of Azhar’s work: a conversational style, which gives his films an accessible feel, and
a tendency to get in the viewer’s face with, well, his face. It looms large, as we see him tapping away at his laptop or holding forth with his opinions.

It’s difficult to know whether this is ego run riot (it is worth noting that eight researchers were included in the credits, although they did not appear in the film), or a BBC Three tic, or because finding information online, which Azhar does a lot, doesn’t lend itself to visuals. But he displayed some journalistic nous and was able to demonstrate that the trio were taken in by ISIS propaganda while never letting us forget that they had a choice, and they chose to become killers.