A number of young people from Somali families living in Britain are among the international brigade who have volunteered to fight with the country’s Islamic militia.

The authorities concede that they have no accurate figure for the number of British passport holders who took part in the recent battles but they believe that it is “in the dozens, not the hundreds”. Most are thought to have dual nationality.

While in the past decade some British Muslims have been smuggled into terror training camps run by al-Qaeda and its affiliates inside Somalia, this latest wave travelled to their ancestral homeland to support the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), which held sway in Mogadishu, the capital, until last month.

There are an estimated 50,000 Somalis living in Britain. According to the United Nations, British-based Somali donors sent home £600,000 in recent months to support the union. UN investigators said that additional funds were sent from Britain through the United Arab Emirates.

Richard Dowden, director of the Royal African Society, said yesterday: “A distinction must be drawn between those who went to support the UIC, and the young men who were drawn to Somalia by terrorist groups. All of these men and women who travelled there in recent months are of Somali extraction, while al-Qaeda and its sympathisers attracted people of all nationalities.”

Western intelligence chiefs belatedly realised that Somalia was fertile ground for al-Qaeda training camps in the mid-1990s.

With British passports it was easy for militants to fly into Kenya without a visa and cross the porous borders with Somalia. It was from there that militants planned their simultaneous bomb attacks on two US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998, which killed 262 people.

One of the men who took part was Rashed Daoud alOwhali, a student born in Liverpool. He was supposed to die in the attack as he sat in the passenger seat of a lorry laden with explosives which drove through the main gates of the embassy in Nairobi.

Al-Owhali lost his nerve at the last minute and leapt out. He fled two days later but was picked up and handed over to the Americans.

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