This article was
written by Rukmini Callimachi and published in the New York times edition of
June 27, 2015. It highlights how ISIS utilizes social Media platforms to
recruit unsuspecting young adults, most notably young girls, into its terror
organization. The group reportedly uses sleek, persuasive communication media
that appeal to its targets and persuades them to join its network.
In light of the
recent declaration of allegiance to the group by Isa Damsaka, otherwise known
as Abubakar Shekau the erstwhile 'publicity secretary' of the sect,
as well as the numerous co-produced youtube media flicks and twitter messages
that allude to the obvious association between the two terror groups, it stands
to reason that Boko Haram may soon follow this recruitment pattern-if they have
not already.
As such, I feel it
would greatly help our society's fight against terror if stories like what you
are about to read are brought to the attention of everyone, especially since we
are now in the digital age and most Nigerians now live online. Kindly read and
share this to others.
You may be helping
someone out there not become a future terrorist!
Note: Due to the
length of the article, the post will be divided into four...I hope u guys find
it as educating as I did.
Yours sincerely,
"The Ghost"
FLIRTING WITH THE
ISLAMIC STATE
The conversations
between a young woman in rural Washington State and a British man with ties to
radical Islam may provide clues about how ISIS recruits new members around the
world.
Alex, a 23-year-old
Sunday school teacher and babysitter, was trembling with excitement the day she
told her Twitter followers that she had converted to Islam.
For months, she had
been growing closer to a new group of friends online — the most attentive she
had ever had — who were teaching her what it meant to be a Muslim.
Increasingly, they were telling her about the Islamic State and how the group
was building a homeland in Syria and Iraq where the holy could live according
to God’s law.
One in particular,
Faisal, had become her nearly constant companion, spending hours each day with
her on Twitter, Skype and email, painstakingly guiding her through the
fundamentals of the faith.
But when she
excitedly told him that she had found a mosque just five miles from the home
she shared with her grandparents in rural Washington State, he suddenly became
cold.
The only Muslims she
knew were those she had met online, and he encouraged her to keep it that way,
arguing that Muslims are persecuted in the United States. She could be labeled
a terrorist, he warned, and for now it was best for her to keep her conversion
secret, even from her family.
So on his guidance,
Alex began leading a double life. She kept teaching at her church, but her
truck’s radio was no longer tuned to the Christian hits on K-LOVE. Instead, she hummed along with the
ISIS anthems blasting out of her turquoise iPhone, and began daydreaming
about what life with the militants might be like.
“I felt like I was
betraying God and Christianity,” said Alex, who spoke on the condition that she
be identified only by a pseudonym she uses online. “But I also felt excited
because I had made a lot of new friends.”
Even though the
Islamic State’s ideology is explicitly at odds with the West, the group is
making a relentless effort to recruit Westerners into its ranks, eager to
exploit them for their outsize propaganda value.Through January this year, at
least 100 Americans were thought to have traveled to join jihadists in Syria
and Iraq, among nearly 4,000 Westerners who had done so.
The reach of the
Islamic State’s recruiting effort has been multiplied by an enormous cadre of
operators on social media. The terrorist group itself maintains a 24-hour
online operation, and its effectiveness is vastly extended by larger rings of
sympathetic volunteers and fans who pass on its messages and viewpoint, reeling
in potential recruits, analysts say.
Alex’s online circle
— involving several dozen accounts, some operated by people who directly identified
themselves as members of the Islamic State or whom terrorism analysts believe
to be directly linked to the group — collectively spent thousands of hours
engaging her over more than six months. They sent her money and plied her with
gifts of chocolate. They indulged her curiosity and calmed her apprehensions as
they ushered her toward the hard-line theological concepts that ISIS is built
on.
As a Christian, Alex
presented the need for an extra step in the process. Yet she helped close the
gap herself: Trying to explain the attraction, she said she had already been
drawn to the idea of living a faith more fully.
Extensive interviews
with Alex and her family, along with a review of the emails, Twitter posts,
private messages and Skype chats she exchanged, which they agreed to share with
The New York Times on the condition that their real names and hometown not be
revealed, offered a rare window into the intense effort to indoctrinate a young
American woman, increasing her sense of isolation from her family and
community.
“All of us have a
natural firewall in our brain that keeps us from bad ideas,” said Nasser
Weddady, a Middle East expert who is preparing a research paper on combating
extremist propaganda. “They look for weaknesses in the wall, and then they
attack.”
Enticing the
Lonely
To get to Alex’s
house from the nearest town, visitors turn off at a trailer park and drive for
a mile past wide, irrigated fields of wheat and alfalfa.
“My grandparents
enjoy living in the middle of nowhere. I enjoy community,” Alex said. “It gets
lonely here.”
She has lived with
her grandparents for almost all her life: When she was 11 months old, her
mother, struggling with drug addiction, lost custody of her. Her therapist says
that fetal alcohol syndrome, which has left Alex with tremors in her hands, has
also contributed to a persistent lack of maturity and poor judgment.
That only partly
explains what happened to her online, her family says.
After dropping out of
college last year, she was earning $300 a month babysitting two days a week and
teaching Sunday school for children at her church on weekends. At home, she
spent hours streaming movies on Netflix and updating her social media
timelines.
“All the other kids
spread their wings and flew,” says her 68-year-old grandmother, who has raised
eight children and grandchildren in a modest but tidy home the size of a
double-wide trailer. “She is like a lost child.”
Then on Aug. 19, her
phone vibrated with a CNN alert.
James Foley, a
journalist she had never heard of, had been beheaded by ISIS, a group she knew
nothing about. The searing image of the young man kneeling as the knife was
lifted to his throat stayed with her.
Riveted by the
killing, and struck by a horrified curiosity, she logged on to Twitter to see
if she could learn more.
“I was looking for
people who agreed with what they were doing, so that I could understand why
they were doing it,” she said. “It was actually really easy to find them.”
She found herself
shocked again, this time by the fact that people who openly identified as
belonging to the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, took the time to
politely answer her questions.
“Once they saw that I
was sincere in my curiosity, they were very kind,” she said. “They asked
questions about my family, about where I was from, about what I wanted to do in
life.”
One of the first
relationships she struck up was with a man who told her he was an ISIS fighter
named Monzer Hamad, stationed near Damascus, the Syrian capital.
Soon they were
chatting for hours every day, their interactions giddy, filled with smiley
faces and exclamations of “LOL.”
“Hole,” she wrote at
10:13 a.m. on Oct. 6.
A minute later, she
added: “Hello* stupid autocorrect.”
He replied: “haha how
are you?”
“did you think of
what i said aboyt islam,” he asked, his messages sprinkled with typos.
What happened next
tracks closely with the recommendations in a manual written by Al Qaeda in
Iraq, the group that became the Islamic State, titled “A Course in the Art of
Recruiting.” A copy was recovered by United States forces in Iraq in 2009.
The pamphlet advises
spending as much time as possible with prospective recruits, keeping in regular
touch. The recruiter should “listen to his conversation carefully” and “share
his joys and sadness” in order to draw closer.
Then the recruiter
should focus on instilling the basics of Islam, making sure not to mention
jihad.
“Start with the
religious rituals and concentrate on them,” says the manual, which was reviewed
in the archive of the Conflict Records Research Center at the National
Defense University in Washington.
Hamad instructed Alex
to download the Islamic Hub app on her iPhone. It sent her a daily “hadith,” or
saying by the Prophet Muhammad.
She felt as if she
finally had something to do.
“I was on my own a
lot, and they were online all the time,” she said.
Her Twitter timeline
through that period is peppered with posts from her that begin, “Sincere
question,” followed by a theological query. They were answered immediately. If
before she waited hours to hear back from friends, now her iPhone was vibrating
all day with status updates, notifications, emoticons and Skype voice mail
messages.
She occasionally
pushed back, questioning how the jihadists could justify beheadings. But she
had already developed deep doubts about the Islamic State’s portrayal in the
media as brutal killers.
“I knew that what
people were saying about them wasn’t true,” she said.
Her Skype discussions
had even uncovered an unexpected bit of common ground with Hamad, who seemed to
know a lot about the Bible.
Later in October,
Hamad asked her to reread the Bible and report back on how Christ described
himself.
He guided her to
verses like John 12:44: “And Jesus Christ cried out and said, ‘Whoever believes
in me, believes not in me, but in He who sent me.’ ”
He explained to her
that Christ was a man who deserved to be revered as a prophet. But he was not
God.
The discussion
unmoored Alex, who had chosen a quote by Jesus to illustrate her high school
yearbook page.
One morning, roughly
two months after she first began communicating with ISIS supporters, Alex asked
to see the pastor of her Presbyterian church. She wanted to know whether the
idea of the Trinity that Christians believed in — God, Jesus and the Holy
Spirit — meant they were polytheists.
Friendly at first,
the pastor ushered her out after 15 minutes, telling her she needed to trust in
the mystery of God, she said.
The arguments she was
hearing online are the textbook approach to luring Christians to radical Islam,
says Mubin Shaikh, a former member and recruiter for an extremist Islamist
group, who testified before Congress on the mechanics of radicalization and was
among those who tried to intervene online as Alex drifted toward extremism.
“I was debating
Christians using these same arguments on Yahoo and AOL chat back in the 1990s,
when modems made that loud, beeping sound,” said Mr. Shaikh, who traveled to
Pakistan to meet the Taliban before renouncing his radical views and becoming
an undercover operative for Canadian intelligence.
The next time she
attended service, Alex did not stand when the pastor invited the congregation
to take communion.
“What you do not know
is that i am not inviting you to leave christianity,” Hamad wrote, when she
relayed what she had done. “Islam is the correction of christianity.”
Two days later, Alex
wrote: “I can agree that Muhammad and Jesus are prophets not God.”
He responded, “So
what are you waiting for to become a muslim?”
Soon after, his Skype
icon went gray.
Day after day, she
looked for him, but he was gone. She wondered whether he had died in battle.
By the last week of
October, Alex was communicating with more than a dozen people who openly
admired the Islamic State. Her life, which had mostly seemed like a blurred
series of babysitting shifts and lonely weekends roaming the mall, was now
filled with encouragement and tutorials from her online friends.
One of her new Muslim
“sisters” sent Alex a $200 gift certificate to IslamicBookstore.com. She and others chose books for Alex and mailed them to
her home. They included an English-language Quran and a basic study guide.
Among the people who
picked up where Hamad left off was a Twitter user called Voyager, whose profile
picture showed white stallions galloping through crashing waves.
In November, he asked
for her email address and told her his name was Faisal Mostafa and that he
lived in Stockport, near Manchester, England. He asked for her Skype ID, and
soon they began chatting, cameras turned off in keeping with Muslim rules on
modesty.
He typically came
online when it was 3 p.m. for Alex, and before long they were talking for hours
each day, sometimes till 10 p.m. When she calculated the time difference, she
realized Faisal was chatting with her from around 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. his time.
Although he spent all
night nearly every night speaking to her, the conversation remained strictly
platonic, she said. Each day he had prepared a lesson, starting with the
fundamentals of praying. They included the wudu, the ritual washing of the
hands, wrists, arms, face and feet before each of the five daily prayers. And
he emphasized the need for Muslims to place their heads on the ground while
praying, citing a Bible verse in which Jesus did so.
She knelt next to her
bed, her forehead touching the fuzzy carpet.
Her life, which had
mostly seemed like a blurred series of babysitting shifts and lonely weekends
at the mall, was now filled with encouragement and tutorials from her online
friends.
...to be continued
#VictoryNA
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