THE party of youths pulled on their blue overalls, snapped shut their visors and, taking aim with their paintball guns, prepared for four hours of licensed mayhem.
But the men who pursued each other last Sunday morning through the wooded grounds of Delta Force’s paintballing park near Congleton, Cheshire, had little in common with the stag parties and company teams nearby.
Instead of listening to corporate pep talks between sessions, the young Asian men were instructed by an imam dressed in fatigues on the need to unite Muslims worldwide in an international empire.
One senior member of the group, who is a member of Hizb-ut-Tahrir (HT), which Tony Blair has proposed should be banned, insisted that devout Muslims should refuse to vote in British elections.
HT, a group that preaches against the existence of Israel, has been described as a "conveyor belt to terrorism" by critics even within the Muslim community, though it says it eschews violence. It is banned in several Arab countries, and banned by the National Union of Students from British university campuses.
The day before, in an unrelated operation, police had raided a Muslim school, set in woodland near Crowborough, East Sussex, in an investigation into alleged terrorist training camps in Britain.
There have also been fears that terrorist training camps were being held in the Lake District and north Wales, and the terrorists Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer went on a whitewater rafting "bonding" trip in Wales before the London bombings of July 2005.
Undercover Sunday Times reporters were present last Sunday to witness first-hand the early stages of the radicalisation of young Asians by Islamic militants.
The reporters watched 10 youths, in their late teens or early twenties, arrive and were invited to join the session. During a lull in the game, they were approached by an imam, Ahsraf Bader, 34, who was with the group.
Bader, wearing a fleece jacket and jeans, described Osama Bin Laden as a "Muslim brother" and said it was the "responsibility" of every Muslim to bring back the caliphate, or a pan-Islamic government.
Kasim Shafiq, a senior member of the group and who said that he was a member of HT, declared that Muslims should not vote in British elections. "Our own shahadah [creed] tells us that the authority and law do not belong to the non-Muslims, so why are we going to vote for non-Muslims?" he said.
Shafiq, 27, an IT specialist, added: "If you think that you can win power, if you look at the logistics of how this country works . . . you’ve got to change the [minds and opinions of the] whole of the cabinet towards Islam, you’ve got to change the whole of the army towards Islam, then you will gain power."
The group organising the paintballing activity, the Cheetham Hill Youth Forum, states it is a community body that works on social problems in the inner-city district of Manchester.
The 15-strong paintballing party arrived in a silver Mercedes, a dark blue VW Polo and a Vauxhall Astra at the venue in Brereton Green, Congleton, which was used by a party of Manchester United players, including Wayne Rooney and Rio Ferdinand, earlier this year. They were expecting 40 to turn up but the absentees had been delayed at an HT conference, held the previous evening in London.
The course, named Zulu Wood, was muddy and the forest was strewn with barrels and mock ancient statues, with sheds to serve as bunkers.
The Asian group paid no attention to the 300 or so other players at the six-acre site, although they kept their voices down when, at the end of a game, the winning team called "Allahu Akbar [God is great]".
During one game, a player said: "I’ve been shot." His team-mate replied: "Don’t worry, the shahid [martyr] never dies."
The leaders of the group questioned the undercover reporters about their backgrounds and, once satisfied about their credentials, appeared eager to win them over to their beliefs.
"Leave me your number and next time I am in the area [east London] I’ll call you and show you the brothers around there," said Shafiq. "They do a lot of paintballing and . . . hiking. They call themselves the East London Youth Forum."
The London forum was described this weekend by Hanif Qadir, a moderate Muslim leader linked to the Waltham Forest Islamic Association mosque, as a "front" organisation for HT. He said HT targeted "vulnerable young teenagers" with "inflammatory leaflets". He added: "They can’t see the damage they cause to the Muslim community. If you want sharia [Islamic law] , then go and ask for it in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan."
Shafiq described the activities of the Cheetham Hill Youth Forum: "It’s off our own backs. There’s me, five, six of us brothers. And we thought, just engage in something, I suppose.
"Obviously at a young age that’s the best time to speak to the Muslims, because when they get older, obviously it’s much harder to try and get them to practise Islam than when they’re younger."
He said that while he was a member of HT, the youth forum was supposed to be independent of the organisation. Blair announced after the London bombings last year that he was considering banning HT.
Shafiq said the authorities were using the fear of terrorism to pressure Muslims to integrate: "Right now there is this big integration thing going on at the moment, isn’t it. And they use this terror thing as a way to make the Muslims integrate with the western way."
Afzal Khan, a former lord mayor of Manchester, said HT’s message was damaging to Muslims: "HT’s message of not participating in voting is wrong.
"We are here [in Britain] as a small minority and we have to live with the majority. If they want to live under an Islamic caliphate, they should take this idea to Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. and go and create it over there."
Bader, who lives near the Eccles and Salford mosque in Manchester, said it was the imams’ duty to give political advice: "They have to, akhi [brother], this is their responsibility. Politics is something you can’t separate."
He was scathing about the compromises made by mainstream imams in Britain: "Imams here, they get paid to be secular. They are here to survive. Islam is not their priority. Islam is second, which means all those things we want to talk on, they will not."
One young Asian, who has taken part in past events organised by the Cheetham Hill Youth Forum, said it was a sophisticated recruitment operation. "They organised paintballing, five-a-side football and other social events to persuade parents to let their sons go off with them," he said.
"The kids’ fathers have little idea what their sons are getting up to because they work 18 hours per day as taxi drivers, and the mothers are uneducated. Many of the HT leaders have jobs in the corporate world, so they borrow bonding techniques used on management courses."
Taji Mustapha, a spokesman for HT, said the Cheetham Hill Youth Forum and the East London Youth Forum were not members of his organisation and had no links with it. "Cheetham Hill Youth Forum is not a front for HT. If HT is doing something illegal, then I’ll deal with it," he said.
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