How former Islamic extremist Haseeb Hamayoon had his ideology changed with the help of a mixed martial arts expert

By his own admission, Haseeb Hamayoon at his most radical ranked a nine out of 10 in terms of his extremist views.

In 2014, he was arrested in London along with two others while buying a knife and charged with planning to behead a civilian, possibly a poppy seller, on Remembrance Day.

After spending almost two years in jail while on trial, along with co-accused Yousaf Syed, Mr Hamayoon was acquitted and released after a jury was unable to reach a verdict.

Nadir Syed, Yousaf’s cousin, was jailed for life for planning to carry out a Lee Rigby-style beheading around Armistice Day.

Mr Rigby, a 25-year-old Afghan war veteran, was murdered by Islamic extremists in broad daylight in a southeast London street in 2013.

A Saudi-born American with Pakistani heritage, Mr Hamayoon speaks with a slight Australian twang.

He insists he was never part of a terrorism plot but was guilty of holding extreme Islamic views.

In an exclusive interview with 7.30, the 34-year-old revealed how his path to extremism was cemented in Perth, and details his journey back to moderate Islam, thanks to British cage fighting, mixed martial arts expert Usman Raja.

The founder of the Unity Initiative, Mr Raja has a tough exterior and a street credibility hard to match. He began working to change the ideology of terrorists in London in 2008.

With his wife, Angela Misra, the couple has worked with 200 convicted terrorists, returnee brides and extremists in Britain.

At one point they had a contract for their work with the Home Office.

The couple credit their success to a holistic approach, with a focus on recognising the humanity in each person they work with.

Cage fighting is a key tool used by Mr Raja to convince his students the way they think about Islam is wrong.

“You’re not going to take information from someone you don’t respect,” he told 7.30.

“We’re not talking about some middle-class guy who’s gone to university, you are talking about a street-level guy that is part of the brotherhood.”

Extremist views rose from discontentment

Mr Hamayoon was on the run from the law when he moved to Australia.

He’d skipped bail after being arrested during an armed hold-up in his home town of Chicago, and fled to Pakistan.

Then aged just 21, his liberal American upbringing didn’t bode well there, and after a year it was arranged for him to attend cooking school at the Perth Institute Western Australia.

In 2008, using his Pakistani passport, he was granted a student visa.

Mr Hamayoon recounted how he worked hard to fit in with fellow students, turning to alcohol and marijuana. But as the years passed he was increasingly discontent, and he decided he needed to “discipline” himself and turned to Islam.

In 2011 he started to practice at a local mosque and was introduced to members of Millatu Ibrahim. A group with the same name was banned in Germany in 2012.

Haseeb described the mosque and its Imam as against extremism.

However, he began to associate with some worshippers who had extreme views and met others from Sydney and Melbourne.

“All this is taking place, me coming into the religion, me practising, me meeting these people from Millatu Ibrahim at around the time when things are happening in Syria,” Mr Hamayoon told 7.30.

“So there are a lot of emotions involved. And it was being portrayed as, this is the right thing to do, this is the correct path, you should be going to fight in Syria because your brothers and sisters are in need.”

‘Us vs them’

At this time, Mr Hamayoon said racism was also fuelling his views.

“You are walking down the street [and] you’re wearing your Islamic dress or a thobe or a hat and you hear in the background, ‘Hey mussies walking by, mussies walking by mate’, and so that kind of brings the hate out a little bit,” he said.

“It started putting perspective in my head of us versus them.”

After five years in Australia and failing to have his visa extended, it was arranged for Mr Hamayoon to marry his cousin’s daughter. She was a British school teacher, and the couple moved to London to be closer to her family.

“By the time I’m leaving Australia, I had good connections with those people who are now obviously called extremists,” he told 7.30.

In London, he used his Australian contacts to introduce him to “like-minded” Muslims and in 2013 was asked to become a cameraman for Salafi Media UK, a group with links to the banned extremist group Al Muhajiroun.

“A part of me is thinking I’m a bit scared,” he said of his feelings at the time.

“But at the same time, there’s [that] bravado act, that, ‘Oh s***, this is something serious,’ you know, ‘I wanna be a part of this’.”

In his new role, Mr Hamayoon was responsible for filming extreme propaganda that is watched, in his own words, by “thousands and thousands” of people, and he acknowledges that his role was to assist in recruiting Islamic State sympathisers from around the world.

“If you had looked at the videos, the production of those videos, I was in charge of recording these videos that are extremely extreme,” he said.

‘I’ve had to disarm guys with knives’

For Mr Raja it is the extent of the radicalisation that makes Mr Hamayoon’s journey to reform remarkable.

By 2014, Mr Hamayoon was associating with some of the most notorious terrorists in east London, an area that had become a hotspot for ISIS.

This included Brusthom Ziamani, who was jailed for 22 years for planning to behead a British soldier in 2015, and who last year launched an ISIS-inspired attack against a prison guard. His sentence has now been increased to life.

Mr Hamayoon had heard of Mr Raja and his work while in prison and asked authorities for his help when he was acquitted and released in 2016, describing himself at that time as still “extremely radical”.

“I spent two years in jail thinking about the same thing,” he told 7.30.

While Haseeb was still under constant surveillance, Mr Raja spent a year working to change his ideology.

Mr Raja’s work has required countless hours of what he calls interventions, where he counsels terrorists and extremists one-on-one, for hours on end, sometimes with police officers waiting outside.

“I’ve had to disarm guys with knives. Literally, guys have pulled out knives to stab me and then I sit down with them afterwards while they break down in tears,” he told 7.30.

Mr Raja first began his work when parole officers contacted him in 2008 to help Yassin Nassari, who had been convicted of preparing an act of terrorism after being found with plans to build a rocket.

“We literally did 95 per cent of our work for free between 2008 and 2015, and that’s where the ball started rolling,” Mr Raja said.

In 2015, the Unity Initiative signed a contract with the British Home Office to work with convicted terrorists in and out of jail.

‘It’s about recognising that person’s humanity’

The Home Office has confirmed to 7.30 that Mr Raja and his wife refused to sign a renewed contract in 2019 because of changes to the terms and conditions.

“By the end of the contract, I felt that it was best at that stage for us to go our separate ways, because it wasn’t in line with our vision and our approach to dealing with this issue,” Ms Misra told 7.30.

“Unless it’s a holistic approach, there’s very limited impacts that can be had.

“There are a lot of academic ways of describing this but simply put it is about humanisation, it’s about recognising that person’s humanity so they can recognise the humanity in others.”

Raffaello Pantucci, a counter terror expert and Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), provides advice to the Unity Initative and describes the work of the group as “impressive”.

“I think the program is quite effective because it is very honest about what it does, and that is really important if you’re dealing with trying to persuade someone to reject beliefs,” Mr Pantucci said.

“You really have to be honest with them and not appear to be there essentially at the government’s behest.”

Ms Misra works full-time as a doctor and is committed to Unity despite the risks, saying she wants a better life for the couple’s children.

“I want to live in a better world, I want to see change,” she said.

“We’ve got the academic backing that proves that it works, and there isn’t anyone else doing it and so it’s almost a case of if I don’t, who will?”

The ‘vital’ work of reformation

With a string of terrorist attacks across Europe last year, and the UK upgrading its terrorism alert level to severe, Ms Misra says addressing and changing ideological views now is vital.

“I also want to point out that COVID has increased isolation, people are quarantining, they’re self-isolating and they are using echo chambers on social media for talking about those radicalised views,” she said.

“It is only getting worse.”

Mr Hamayoon is now assisting the Unity Initiative with its work and helping reform others.

He’s still a keen student of mixed martial arts.

“I’m training my mind to always be at ease,” he said.

“That’s what we are all chasing. We’re chasing ease, we’re chasing that calmness.”

After a sparring session with Mr Hamayoon at a gym on the outskirts of London, he proudly declared to 7.30 how his extreme thoughts that were once at a “nine out of 10” are now zero.

“If it was to go into the negatives, I’d probably be a negative now,” he said.