RadicalizationU.S. scrambling to identify, locate recruits to radical Islamist ideology
Nearly 3,000 Europeans have traveled to Syria and Iraq to fight alongside the Islamic State (ISIS), but social media and court records suggest just about two dozen Americans have made it to the Middle East to fight with the group. Another two dozen or so have been stopped by the FBI and charged before they could fly to Turkey and cross over into the Syrian territories controlled by ISIS.
U.S. law enforcement, with no clear understanding of how Americans are being recruited, are scrambling to identify U.S. residents attracted to radical Islamic ideology before those individuals try to travel or worse- launch an attack on U.S. soil.
Nearly 3,000 Europeans have traveled to Syria and Iraq to fight alongside the Islamic State (ISIS), but social media and court records suggest just about two dozen Americans have made it to the Middle East to fight with the group. Another two dozen or so have been stopped by the FBI and charged before they could fly to Turkey and cross over into the Syrian territories controlled by ISIS.
U.S. law enforcement, with no clear understanding of how Americans are being recruited, are scrambling to identify U.S. residents attracted to radical Islamic ideology before those individuals try to travel or worse- launch an attack on U.S. soil.
Many American ISIS or Islamic extremist recruits are immigrants or children of immigrants with roots in Muslim countries, while some are recent converts to Islam. They come from across the country, but most are from the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, home to the largest U.S. Somali-immigrant community. In recent years, more than two dozen young men with Somali roots have traveled to fight alongside al-Qaeda-backed al-Shabaab in Somalia. Now, more than a dozen men from this community have left or tried to leave to join ISIS.
Islamic extremist recruits from other parts of the country include a 47-year-old Air Force veteran; Michael Todd Wolfe, a 23-year-old convert to Islam from Texas with a record of assault and theft charges who was stopped at the Houston airport as he tried to traveled to Syria; and Shannon Conley, a 19-year-old woman who thought she could use her skills as a nurse’s aide to help ISIS fighters. She also hoped to marry a Tunisian ISIS recruiter whom she had met online.
The New York Times reports on Abdi Nur, a 20-year-old man who lived in Minneapolis before joining ISIS in Syria. Just after he traveled, his friend, 18-year-old Abdullahi Yusuf, was stopped on 28 May when he tried to leave the country to join Nur in Syria. Law enforcement agents were alerted after a passport specialist became concerned when Yusuf applied for an expedited passport and seemed vague about its purpose.
