Report: Islamic State Harnesses TikTok to Drive Resurgence in Canada
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Canadian police are disrupting a growing number of Islamic State terrorist plots in major cities, a resurgence driven by ISIS recruiting young Canadians to its ranks.
Canada’s Global News on Monday published the results of an investigation that found 20 suspects have been arrested for ISIS-related crimes this year, and 20 were arrested in 2023 as well. Only two comparable arrests were made in 2022.
The Global News quoted one of the youths, Zakarya Rida Hussein, who was 20 at the time of his arrest in June 2023. Hussein posted a message on Snapchat in which he declared: “I’m a member of ISIS. Tomorrow my mission begins. It’s pride month.”
He also sent threatening text messages to the United Conservative Party of Alberta, the party of Premier Danielle Smith, such as: “I’m gonna do a terrorist attack on you guys. I’ll kill each and every one of you.”
Police raided Hussein’s home and found “an ISIS flag, three knives, bomb-making instructions and ideological tracts on killing gay men.” He was arrested along with three minors in Calgary, one of them only 15 years old.
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Most of the individuals profiled by the Global News were recent immigrants from Pakistan, Morocco, Egypt, and other parts of Africa and the Middle East, but a few were older Canadian converts to Islam. One was a 52-year-old named Kimberly Polman who received training from ISIS in Syria before getting involved in terrorism plots in Canada.
Polman figured in another Global News investigative report last year, which chronicled the growing success of the Islamic State at recruiting young girls, using older women like Polman who were trained in Syria during the salad days of the caliphate.
ISIS had a women’s battalion in Syria called Katibah Nusaybah that catered to female recruits who wanted to be more than just passive stay-at-home jihad brides. This battalion had a unit of older women without family connections who became known as the “Sexy Seniors.” Those women received ideological and espionage training, and they helped ISIS refine its pitch to alienated young women living in Western countries.
The current trend is strongly leaning toward young recruits. “Since the start of 2023, almost half the suspects arrested in Canada were under 21, and six were minors,” the Global News noted.
These young people are often approached and recruited by ISIS online, through social media platforms used heavily by young people. TikTok, Snapchat, and Discord were prominent recruiting venues, but Facebook, Reddit, and other platforms are haunted by ISIS recruiters as well, and they are increasingly active on videogame platforms such as Minecraft and Roblox.
Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) Assistant Commissioner Brigitte Gauvin said algorithms played a role in these online recruiting efforts, because “once a person goes on a certain site or researches a certain topic, algorithms will often feed into what they view on a daily basis.”
In other words, according to Gauvin, young people trigger an avalanche of increasingly radical “propaganda” by investigating certain radical topics online, as though they had touched the edge of a whirlpool and were swiftly drawn into the depths of terrorism. This process seems to happen especially quickly with very young Internet users.
Several experts quoted by the Global Times pointed to TikTok as the worst of the social media platforms for radicalization because it has a large percentage of young users, its algorithms are especially aggressive about pushing content to them, and recruiters are very active on the system.
The Islamic State has become an evil spirit haunting the Internet since the destruction of its worldly “caliphate” in Syria and Iraq in 2019. The terror state still has physical territory in places like Afghanistan and Africa and it has become adept at using the Internet to coordinate its worldwide operations. This network also spreads a great deal of propaganda online and has enough manpower to communicate with potential recruits once it piques their interest.
ISIS recruiting took a big hit after the fall of the caliphate, but a few high-profile terrorist attacks in Russia and Iran this year have restored some of the terror state’s murderous credibility. Even though it had no direct connection to the October 7 atrocities perpetrated against Israel by Hamas, ISIS has been able to feed off the climate of anti-Semitic, anti-Western hatred it created.
American and European law enforcement agencies have also reported a surge among young ISIS recruits. An FBI official recently stated the average age of terrorism suspects is now under 21, and the average time from contact with terrorist propaganda to full radicalization is only a few months.
NBC News reported last month that a great deal of the Islamic State’s recruiting energy is emanating from ISIS-Khorasan (ISIS-K), its operation in Afghanistan. ISIS-K has become adept at persuading “disaffected Muslims” to carry out terrorist plots in the United States, Canada, and other Western nations.
“Seeking to rally support and recruit from a range of Muslim diaspora communities in Europe and the U.S., the group has churned out a high volume of videos and articles in more than a dozen languages, including Dari and Pashto, the two primary languages spoken in Afghanistan,” NBC News noted.
Terrorism experts said ISIS-K began by targeting disaffected immigrants to the West from Afghanistan and its neighbor Tajikistan, but soon discovered a rich pool of potential recruits among refugees from other Muslim nations. ISIS-K has mastered the art of playing against their resentments and contempt for the Western cultures they have been transplanted to, and it excels at portraying the Islamic State as the most effective and “pure” Islamist organization fighting against the Western “empire in decline.”
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