Ahmed Ali, 23, from London, started carrying a blade at 16, lost a friend to a stabbing and was knifed himself. This is his story
When I was 16, me and my friends used to hang around the estate youth club. We were good kids, not from bad backgrounds. We’d rap about the road lifestyle and the youth worker would say: “You’re trying to be something you’re not.” He was right. Most of our parents were together, we used to go to Qur’an school and we had good grades. But we’d go as a group into an abandoned block of flats where the police wouldn’t come and we’d smoke some weed. It would get into our heads to start a problem with this guy, rob this, carry knives, that sort of thing. It was a gateway to the hood lifestyle. You hang around your area, think you’re cool and gradually it leads on to worse things.
We started to deal cannabis. Low-class drug dealers at the bottom. We didn’t have real-life problems like our friends dying, becoming drug addicts, going to jail. But that was happening to people older than us. We were dealing to friends, people at school but also other people in our area where other people were dealing. That competition starts the beef.
