Reyaad Khan was, by all accounts, an intelligent and sensitive young man from Riverside, Cardiff. In a video acquired by The Guardian, he voices his concerns over “illegal wars” and warns that a lack of resources for deprived neighbourhoods such as his own may lead some down the “wrong path”. This was a prescient observation. He subsequently moved to Syria where he joined the so-called Islamic State (IS) and became the first British citizen to be killed in an RAF drone strike.Why would someone choose a brutal theocracy over an imperfect democracy? What motivates the estimated 1,000 British Muslims who have joined IS? For some the answer is religion – Islam. For others it is the political ideology of Islamism. For others it is the result of more down-to-earth