Terrorist groups recruit radicalized Muslims online as security operatives work to stop terror

Both the Islamic State group (ISIS) and al-Qaeda have been recruiting lone wolves online to plan terrorist attacks. While counterterrorist organizations worldwide are trying to respond to this phenomenon, they are finding it difficult to prevent all the threats.

“ISIS has used social media to recruit and do its activities,” V.S Subrahmanian, a professor of computer science at Northwestern University, told The Media Line.

Explaining the difficulties in monitoring them, he said: “As experts, we cannot blindly enter online chats of terrorists; this could compromise us for two reasons: The terrorists may recognize us as potential threats to them if we lack proper training for undercover work or if they consider us unsuitable as new members. On top of that, intelligence organizations may target us as suspicious if we’re in certain groups.”

According to Michael Barak, a researcher at the Institute for Counter-Terrorism of the Launder School of Government Diplomacy and Strategy at Reichman University, “RocketChat is a very famous tool used by both organizations. They have inner chat rooms where they can find new contacts. In addition, there is Discord, another tool used to explain to new militants the instructions to join the ranks.”

With al-Qaeda in particular, Barak said, “We see the example of Inspire magazine, written in 13 different languages. Languages are important to locally target the Muslim audience but, overall, the message is basically the same on how to plan terrorist attacks worldwide by building explosives, targeting specific people, and so on.”

He explained further: “This magazine [Inspire] is very useful to target lone wolves in the West, because they are already within the Western countries, but the call to jihad also applies to people living in the MENA [Middle East and North Africa] region, as much as the militants pursue the goals of the terrorists’ agenda.”

Both organizations attract new assets offline as well. They use various methods, ranging from radical speeches in mosques and prisons to applying pressure through friends or relatives already in the circle who are used as mediators in the recruitment process.

Targeting young, radicalized Muslims

“There is the case of Birmingham, where there is a huge Salafi community. Within the mosque, they recruit people for ISIS,” said Barak. “The targets are mostly young Muslims who radicalized themselves once they came in contact with European society, which they perceive as different from their own.”

The recruitment has historically been directed toward “transnationals,” who identify with jihadist ideas and live in Western countries as members of the Muslim diaspora, as in the case of Birmingham. “Terrorist organizations such as ISIS and al-Qaeda have tried to convince those who live in the diaspora that jihadism is the only remedy for racial and social inequities,” Herbert Ferguson Tinsley, an analyst at the Government Accountability Office and former senior researcher at START, the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, told The Media Line.

This phenomenon extends beyond the UK; there are also examples of such recruitment methods occurring in the US. “In recent years, there have been cases of recruiting for ISIS among the Somalian immigrants in Minnesota, and this created a huge asset for terrorist groups to have someone already in ‘enemy’ countries, such as America,” said Subrahmanian.

Terrorist groups have long used social media platforms, but this trend has significantly increased after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel. Highlighting the ISIS-K newspaper Voice of Khurasan, Barak said: “In response to the war in Gaza, they have been publishing an operative manual on how to carry out a genocide against the Jews and asked Muslims in the West to target synagogues and community centers. Their rhetoric calls for a jihad to punish Israel and the West, which is affiliated with it.”

“Through its online channels, al-Qaeda has always mentioned that in order to defeat Israel it is necessary to overthrow the Jordanian and Saudi kingdoms and [Egyptian President Abdel Fattah] el-Sisi for being involved with Israel in the first place,” added Barak.

In Turkey, ISIS-K, the terror group behind the recent Moscow attack, has strengthened its presence, using the country as a financial and transit hub, enabled by the growing number of Afghan refugees crossing into the country through Iran. Since 2014, Turkey has permitted many jihadists to enter the country and has adopted a policy of nonintervention, which has allowed foreign fighters to pass through its borders to join ISIS in Syria. Those involved in the recent ISIS-K Moscow attack reportedly came straight from Turkey.