A Muslim religious leader is among five men detained during dawn raids across Greater Manchester by anti-terrorist police officers.  According to local media sources, the unnamed preacher delivers Koranic spiritual sessions twice-a-week at various local mosques.  “He is very spiritual”, said one source within the Muslim community.

Police swooped on addresses in the Deane area of Bolton, in Stalybridge and in the Levenshulme, Fallowfield and Longsight districts of Manchester.   The Longsight address is very close to the Dar-ul-Ulum Qadria Jilania Islamic Centre (formerly St John’s Church) where British National Party activists recently discovered shocking evidence of the systematic desecration of Christian gravestones.

According to sources within Greater Manchester Police, the anti-terror arrests were the culmination of a year-long investigation into the alleged recruitment in Britain of terrorists for training in Afghanistan.

Even as British police, in a supposedly British city, finalised their plans to foil an alleged network supporting Afghan terrorism, news was breaking of the tragic death of yet another British soldier in Labour’s futile and bloody Afghanistan campaign.  The soldier, from 33 Regiment, Royal Engineers, was killed by an improvised explosive device at Gereshk in Helmand province.

Surely nothing could better illustrate the blindingly obvious fact that the war on terror will be won, or lost, in the colonised enclaves of inner-city Britain, not in the deserts of Helmand.