Lost in Syria: the journey to jihadi for Neil Prakash

Just 18 months before he was urging Australians to launch ­attacks for Islamic State, Neil Prakash was seemingly lost in Syria.

Former Melburnian Neil Prakash in the latest Islamic State propaganda video.

Just 18 months before he was urging Australians to launch ­attacks for Islamic State, Neil Prakash was seemingly lost in Syria, with no idea what the group’s Arabic name was.

In his own words, 23-year-old Abu Khaled al-Cambodi, as the former Melbourne man now prefers to be known, did not enter a mosque in his first four weeks in Syria. In fact, at the time he travelled to the conflict, he had only been a Muslim for little more than a year.

“A brother approached me and he said to me, ‘Would you like to come to Dawlah?’” Prakash recounts, after describing his first weeks in Syria, in a newly released Islamic State propaganda video.

“At the time I was thinking, ‘Dawlah? What’s Dawlah?’ The reason I said this is I only knew the English name, Islamic State. He said to me, ‘There’s a lot of brothers from Australia that want to meet you’.”

From that humble introduction, Prakash has risen to become the most senior Australian member of Islamic State, recruiting youngsters at home to the group and encouraging others to launch attacks at home. The video, filmed several weeks ago, was released days after five Melbourne teenagers were ­arrested and two charged with terrorism offences over an alleged plot to attack police at Anzac Day services.

Prakash had encouraged that alleged plot, and had been a ­visitor to the same Melbourne ­Islamic centre, al-Furqan, as the teenagers during the short period between becoming a Muslim and travelling to Syria. Even in the latest video, in which he is seen sitting with former Sydney man Mark John Taylor and walking with his niqab-covered wife, he again urges “my beloved brothers in Islam in Australia” to “rise”.

“You must start attacking ­before they attack you,” he says, while praising Melbourne teen Numan Haider, who was shot dead in September after attacking police officers with a knife.

While authorities have indicated Haider’s death may have provoked the Melbourne teen­agers to begin their alleged plot, Prakash’s journey to jihad was less dramatic. It had been a family holiday to Cambodia that pre-empted his conversion from a lapsed Buddhist to Islam as a 20-year-old, he has revealed.

Born into a Cambodian and Fijian family, he had been a Buddhist his entire life. But after witnessing “shirk” — idolatry — in his mother’s ancestral homeland, he began to doubt his faith in Buddhism. He returned to Melbourne, where Muslim friends encouraged him to move to Islam, and he joined them at a mosque to take the Shahada, a spoken testimony of belief.

“It was one of the best feelings I’ve had in my life, the unity that I felt with the brothers at the masjid (mosque), and how everyone looked like they were following the Sunnah (the way of Muhammad),” he says in the video, in which he does not identify the “brothers” or the mosque.

But the feeling didn’t last. “One day I was thinking to myself, there’s more to Islam than just praying,” he says.

He says that he came to the conclusion that he needed to do more as a Muslim after reading a passage in the Koran about people who had missed out on an important battle. “I was shocked at myself. I was thinking, ‘What am I doing? I have a good life here. I have a job, I have an income, I have a car, I have a house. What sacrifice have I done for the sake of Allah?’ I thought about the people overseas in the Muslim lands that are suffering. And this is when my journey really started beginning. I started attending this masjid, learning about the basics of Islam,” he says.

He spent more than a year ­ridding himself of his possessions before leaving for Syria. “Every time I went to make hijrah ­(migration), some people come in the way,” he says. To the detriment of authorities in Australia, he somehow found a way.