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ISIS in America: how doomsday Muslim cult is turning kids against parents
So far, 58 Americans have been arrested in 2015 for plotting violence or attempting to join the so-called Islamic State in Syria. More than half are under 25, and experts say recruits are getting younger.
The group, the self-proclaimed Islamic State in occupied sections of Syria and Iraq, is using social media and the worldwide reach of the Internet in a sophisticated recruitment campaign that is making some families feel helpless to stop a slow-motion kidnapping of their children.
So far this year, 58 Americans – more than half under 25 – have been arrested for attempting to travel to Syria or for plotting violence in the US. That is more than twice the number of similar arrests for the entire year in 2014, and more than twice the number for all of 2013, as well.
### “It is psychological warfare,” says Daniel Koehler, director of the Berlin-based German Institute on Radicalization and De-radicalization Studies (GIRDS).
“They work like headhunters,” he says of the recruiters. “They have studied everything we know in our Western research about the psychology of radicalization, or social isolation, or the development and influence of politics.”
He stresses: “They have studied us.”
To parents and observers, the group’s success is baffling, given its brutal tactics such as beheadings, sexual slavery of women and girls as young as 10, genocidal massacres, and crucifixions. Most Westerners see little appeal in a medieval group that is actively setting the stage for what it hopes will become an apocalyptic showdown in which its unyielding, puritanical version of Islam will emerge victorious.…
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