A teenager whose brothers were killed fighting in Syria has been sentenced to four years for drug dealing.

Mohammed Deghayes’ older brothers Abdullah, 18, and Jaffar, 17, died in 2014 fighting for allies of Al-Qaeda.

The family was the subject of a serious case review last year into the authorities’ handling of the radicalisation of the young men.

Mohammed, 19, who has never been linked to Islamist activities, was sentenced at Lewes Crown Court yesterday for a series of drug-related crimes.

Handing down the sentence, Judge Charles Kemp said: “It gives me no pleasure in doing so in one so young, but it’s got to teach you, and others like you who might be tempted to get involved in this business, that it doesn’t work at the end of the day.”

He had spoken sympathetically to Deghayes, who appeared in court wearing a green long-sleeved T-shirt and short cropped black hair, about his difficulties as a young teenager when his brothers were killed and he was made a ward of court.

Judge Kemp added: “You took to using drugs, built up debts and were then offered a way out – a way of repaying those debts. That is a desperately sad story in one so young.”

But he said the custodial sentence was important because “once those drugs have left your hands, you’ve got no control over whose hands they end up in, and too often they end up in the hands of the young and vulnerable people.”

Before Deghayes was led away to be taken to a young offenders’ institute, the judge finished: “Come out clean, and keep clean, and lead a decent life.”

Deghayes, of Chadborne Close, Brighton, was sentenced in connection with three separate indictments.

Most recently he was arrested in Coldean Lane, Brighton, in November 2017 by police who smelled cannabis in a car he was in.

They found Deghayes in the back and discovered a small quantity of cannabis and cocaine, and 19 wraps of heroin and crack cocaine hidden in his anus.

The drugs had a combined street value of about £100.

He pleaded guilty to two counts of possession with intent to supply Class A drugs and one count of possession of Class B drugs in February.

A year before that arrest, he was found by police in a house in Tavistock Drive in Brighton with five other men surrounded by a large quantity of drugs.

Police found 118g of loose MDMA (the active ingredient in ecstasy) with a street value of nearly £4,000. They also found around 8g of cocaine.

At trial he pleaded guilty to two counts of possession with intent to supply Class A drugs. Deghayes was additionally sentenced for breaching terms of a suspended sentence handed down in April 2017.

He was sentenced to eight months, suspended for two years, after being found with 24 packs of MDMA in September 2016.

His four-year sentence comprises three years for each of the two counts committed in November 2017, to run concurrently; three and a half years for each of the two counts committed in November 2016, to run concurrently; and six of the eight months of his suspended sentence, to run consecutively.

Hollie Collinge, defending, said Deghayes had turned to drugs as “a much-needed escape from everything going on around him” and that he had been clean during the six months he had spent in custody since his November 2017 arrest.