ISIS-K online recruitment poses threat to Western security ahead of Olympics

() – Almost two-thirds of ISIS-related arrests in Europe in the last nine months have been of teenagers, according to a leading academic study, while concern grows among European security officials ahead of the Paris Olympics over the growing power and reach in the West of the Islamist militant group and its affiliate ISIS-K.

According to Peter Neumann, professor of security studies at King’s College London, the academic study of 27 ISIS-related attacks or plots foiled since October revealed that of the 58 suspects, 38 were between the ages of 13 and 19. was also able to verify most of Neumann’s data with European security officials. Neumann noted that the latest Europol data showed that “the number of planned attacks and bombings has more than quadrupled” since 2022.

The apparent uptick in the recruitment of young radicals to carry out terrorist acts comes as European security officials express concern about a possible resurgence of organized or “targeted” terrorist attacks. The Paris Summer Olympics, which begin this Friday, have been specifically threatened by ISIS-K, the Islamic State in Khorasan, an active ISIS affiliate from Central Asia. The group has built a notable presence in Türkiye over the past three years, according to court documents and analysts. In 2023 alone, 426 suspected members of ISIS-K were detained in 122 operations, according to the Turkish intelligence agency MIT.

A British security source said the so-called “targeted terrorist threat” had become a major concern over the past 18 months, with ISIS-K the most potent group under scrutiny. Young people accessing extremist spaces and media online also remains a major problem, the source said.

“Groups like (ISIS-K) specifically target young teenagers,” Neumann said. “They may not be very useful. They can screw up. They can change their minds,” he said, but “that doesn’t make them any less suspicious.” Who would think of a 13 year old boy as a terrorist? “One is enough.”

Neumann added that teenagers were being recruited through social media platforms like TikTok, dragged through algorithms into online “bubbles” where jihadist recruiters can reach them.z

“(ISIS-K) is by far the most ambitious and aggressive part of ISIS at the moment,” he said, adding that this meant the group could plan larger, more complex plots with multiple attackers, while also doing “a lot of people fishing for people on the Internet.”

A TikTok spokesperson said: “We strongly oppose violent extremism and remove 98% of content that violates our rules on promoting terrorism before it is reported to us.”

Of the 27 conspiracies or attacks examined by Neumann, teenagers who targeted this summer’s Olympic Games have notably participated in two.

At the end of May, the French prosecutor’s office accused an 18-year-old young man of Chechen origin of “terrorist criminal association,” specifically of attacking spectators in the city of Saint-Étienne during the Olympic Games, according to a statement from spokesperson Lise Jaulin. of the French anti-terrorist prosecutor’s office. About a fortnight earlier, two men aged 15 and 18 were arrested in the northeast and south of France for planning a terrorist attack whose objective was unclear, according to the statement. In April, a 16-year-old boy from the Haute-Savoie department in southeastern France was arrested for allegedly investigating how to make an explosive belt and die as a martyr for ISIS, possibly to attack the Olympic Games, according to the statement. .

The German Police have also made public two incidents allegedly carried out by four teenagers. Düsseldorf authorities declared in April that they had arrested three teenagers, a 15-year-old boy and girl and a 16-year-old girl, accused of planning a terrorist attack.

In another alleged plot related to a possible knife attack against a synagogue in Heidelberg, which was disrupted in May, an 18-year-old young man was involved, according to a statement from the German prosecutor’s office.

In March, Swiss police arrested a 15-year-old Swiss boy and a 16-year-old Italian boy for supporting ISIS and planning bomb attacks, according to a police statement.

And in May, a 14-year-old Montenegrin girl was arrested for planning an attack in Austria, allegedly inspired by ISIS, with an already purchased knife and axe.

Although these alleged conspiracies with teenagers do not appear to specifically implicate ISIS-K, the expansion of the new ISIS affiliate presents a simultaneous and novel challenge for Western intelligence agencies. ISIS-K recruits do not come mainly from the Arab-speaking world, but from Central Asia, and include Russian-speaking Tajik citizens.

Tajikistan, bordering Afghanistan where ISIS-K first emerged, has long struggled with a mix of poverty, intense political repression by its Moscow-backed government, and a broad spectrum of Islamism from across the region. fervently religious. Analysts say the Tajik minority in Afghanistan is also less represented by the Pashtun Taliban government, adding to anger over discrimination felt by Tajiks across the former Soviet Union.

The ISIS-K threat has also rapidly approached Europe, as evidenced by a widespread wave of arrests in Türkiye. An 87-page indictment relating to the arrest of 18 ISIS-K suspects, many of them Tajiks, for an alleged terrorist conspiracy that included training, support and an attack on the Swedish consulate in Istanbul, offers a window unusual to the “black box” of the ISIS-K conspiracy. It reveals how a shadowy figure, known to detainees as “Rustam”, directs plots in the West – and trains them – from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

The indictment reads: “Rustam/Rüstem (K) is the Tajik who currently heads the ISKP Foreign Operations unit.” The indictment cites a suspect who claims that Rustam used multiple and changing aliases on the Telegram messaging app. “Generally, Rustam deleted the telegram every 15-20 days as a precaution,” the detainee said. “After I deleted it, he would contact me with another username.” Several of the detainees refer to Rustam as director of external operations and explosives for ISIS-K. Last week, 13 of the defendants in this case were sentenced to sentences of between six and ten years for their participation in the plot, while three others were released.

The indictment, first reported by Turkish media, also describes, through detainee testimony, how a conveyor belt of ISIS-K recruits moves through a series of Istanbul hotels. Some then pass through Iran to receive training in Afghanistan. Others travel freely to and from Russia, where ISIS-K murdered 137 people in a horrific attack on Moscow’s Crocus City Hall in March.

The Turkish indictment acknowledges that ISIS-K uses Türkiye as a transit center. “Foreign terrorist fighters from Central Asia could use the Turkey-Iran route in 2023, which could mean not only a loss of prestige for our country, but also the threat of these elements attempting to carry out large-scale action in our country,” says the indictment.

ISIS-K attacked a Catholic church in Istanbul in January, killing one person, the first major assault in Turkey since 2017, after a hiatus that analysts suggested was used to regroup after the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan in 2021 and the fall of the so-called ISIS caliphate in Syria and Iraq. A decade ago, Türkiye was criticized by some analysts for its apparently lax attitude toward extremist Islamists using its border area with Syria and Iraq.