The Islamic State terrorist living in Windsor

In the not-so-distant past, Mohammed Yaseen’s name would have been on the front page of every newspaper in Britain. It would have dominated radio and TV bulletins. The government of the day would be reeling as it tried to explain how a convicted terrorist had been allowed to enter the UK illegally and leech off the state, even as he mocked our country by making an asylum claim on human-rights grounds. Jobs would be lost, careers would be in disarray, over a scandal betraying such carelessness and incompetence. But not in Britain in 2026. We have become numb to the unceasing horrors of our borderless society.

Yaseen is currently living in a bail hostel in Windsor. But before we get to how he ended up there, it’s important to keep the following in mind. He is an Iraqi citizen and a former member of both al-Qaeda and ISIS. He reportedly belonged to the same ‘cell’ that, in 2004, kidnapped and beheaded British engineer Ken Bigley. He has been described in court as a ‘bystander to public executions, stonings and floggings’. He served as a security guard for ‘at least two’ mass executions and was involved in attacks that killed American troops in Iraq. He arrived in Germany in 2014, where in 2020 he was sentenced to four years and three months in prison for participating in a terror organisation and belonging to ISIS.

Yaseen’s recent history is a parable for the drawn-out suicide of Western societies. He made three failed asylum applications in Germany, but was never deported. He watched a TikTok video that told him (correctly, it seems) that the UK ‘accepts everyone’. On 13 December last year, he boarded a small boat in northern France. Like clockwork, his vessel was intercepted in the English Channel and diverted to Dover. From there, he was taken to the Manston immigration centre in Kent, where he lied about his name, age and nationality.

Yaseen was living at an asylum hotel in Basingstoke when, on Christmas Eve, he was arrested and charged after fingerprints had revealed his true identity. In a subsequent court hearing at the Winchester Crown Court, he admitted to one charge of entering the UK without a valid clearance. He was jailed for two years, but was released only last week after serving six months of his sentence. According to reports, he is currently living at a bail hostel in Windsor as he awaits the outcome of his asylum application. Yaseen was most recently spotted at the local Co-op.

You would probably like to think that the British state would make Yaseen’s deportation an immediate priority. It would surely recognise that every day that he remains in Britain only deepens the insult to the UK’s sovereignty and its dignity. But you’d be wrong. The Foreign Office has reportedly ‘raised concerns’ about his potential ‘mistreatment’ in Iraq, in the event of his deportation.

It says much about modern Britain that Mohammed Yaseen’s name has only appeared in a few online articles. Perhaps that’s because such flagrant breaches of our borders no longer shock us. After all, it was only last month that we learnt that a former bodyguard of Ismail Haniyeh – the Hamas leader who orchestrated the 7 October pogrom in southern Israel – has been living in the UK for a decade. He was not only granted asylum but full British citizenship, too. And with his residence in the UK secured, he was then allegedly able to plan a series of anti-Semitic terror attacks in Germany and Austria.

In September, two illegal immigrants from Iran were arrested in Manchester, accused of planning another anti-Semitic terror attack. In October, another illegal immigrant was sentenced to life in prison for attempting to break into the Israeli embassy in London and kill as many people as possible. Multiple murders and countless rapes have been committed by asylum seekers and small-boats migrants in recent years. Such crimes are now so common that they are rarely even deemed newsworthy.

The presence of so many murderous Islamist terrorists in Britain ought to be an Earth-shattering national scandal. The fact that it isn’t is shows how far we have fallen.