By Felicia Schwartz
WASHINGTON--The proliferation of social media has brought
extremist ideologues world-wide into closer and more personal
contact with potential recruits than antiterror officials ever
dreamed possible, but it also has handed Western investigators
powerful new tools for tracking potential threats.
The relationships forged over electronic networks are coming
under scrutiny as larger numbers of young, radicalized men
gravitate from the West toward Syria, drawn by an effective
social-media drive by the group calling itself the Islamic
State.
"You can have a sense of actually knowing someone, a sense of
intimacy with someone you've never met," said J.M. Berger, a
counterterrorism analyst who monitors the Islamic State's online
presence.
Unlike the message boards of old, militants on Twitter and
Facebook often use their real names, or close versions of them.
Western-focused recruitment efforts tend to be led by foreign
fighters, who use social media to post propaganda and engage with
their targets in a more personal way than experts and former
counterterrorism officials had seen in the past with al Qaeda and
other extremist groups.
While they communicate intimately with would-be recruits,
however, they also broadcast public, open-source information that
can allow intelligence officials to track their location and
activities. Social-media activities make it easier for officials to
glean when foreign fighters have arrived in Syria or elsewhere to
join the Islamic State.
The ability of a California man, Douglas McCain, to use a U.S.
passport to travel abroad and join up with Islamic State
illustrates the dilemma. As he migrated into global Islamic
extremism, U.S. officials said they monitored many of his
actions.
Mr. McCain was reported killed last week while fighting on the
side of the Islamic State against other Syrian rebels.
The State Department said that U.S. officials are investigating
reports that a second American may have been killed in Syria
fighting with militants.
U.S. officials believe only a dozen or so Americans have taken
up with Islamic State militants. The National Counterterrorism
Center estimates that more than 100 U.S. citizens have traveled or
attempted to travel to Syria to engage in the continuing conflict,
but it hasn't yet identified an organized recruitment effort aimed
at U.S. citizens.
U.K. officials now believe about 500 Brits have gone to Syria to
fight alongside terrorist groups and that about half have come
back, a British security official said. They also believe that
about 25 to 30 have died in Syria.
According to recent estimates by the State Department, the
Islamic State had 10,000 fighters overall, with approximately 3,000
in Iraq and about 7,000 in Syria. The estimates are considered
fluid.
The Islamic State's social-media outreach is extremely
sophisticated, and generally appeals to "young, lost kids who are
very angry at the world," said Mubin Shaikh, a Canada-based
counterterrorism expert.
"It's a volatile interaction between extremist ideology,
religious ideology and contentious foreign policy," he said, adding
that festering global conflicts throughout the world feed ire and
draw combatants.
For potential American recruits, religion is important--but
usually not enough on its own to encourage someone to join
extremists, Mr. Berger said. Personal trauma, violent tendencies
and political grievances, among other things, usually factor
in.
Government officials have characterized these recruits as "lone
wolves," or self-radicalized people who don't attend terrorist
training camps but are sympathetic to jihadist ideology. In
February, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson said such
fighters are the terrorist threat he is most worried about.
A typical interaction between a "lone wolf" and a recruiter
might go as follows: A young man sees professional-looking
propaganda videos produced by the Islamic State. He watches a few
of the videos and feels that he has something in common with the
men in the video. He then might reach out to the person who posted
the video, either on Twitter or Facebook, and engage with him.
Eventually, a series of conversations online might encourage the
"lone wolf" to travel to Europe, with instructions to find a
particular person who might help him make his way into Syria.
While some people are directly encouraged to come to Syria via
social-media conversations, Mr. Berger has monitored other
exchanges in which a person has tweeted that he has arrived in
Turkey, a signal that he needs an extremist to assist him with
travel over the border.
The Islamic State produces high-resolution videos and hashtag
campaigns. It even has an app that can automatically tweet the
organization's content on users' accounts.
"They have a very good Twitter army; they have social-media
savvy," said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the
Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
The group's battlefield success makes Islamic State content all
the more appealing, finding would-be recruits where they spend most
of their time, on the Internet.
"It's like attracting the moth to the light," Mr. Shaikh
said.
The U.S. conducts its own counterpropaganda campaign on social
media through the State Department's Center for Strategic
Counterterrorism Communications, although it is unclear how
persuasive the campaign is.
The targets are "fence-sitters," mostly disaffected teens and
people in their 20s and 30s. "Those people don't tend to listen to
the U.S. government," said Aki Peritz, a former CIA
counterterrorism analyst.
Most online recruits have had some contact with radicalized
people in their off-screen lives, Mr. Berger said. Mr. McCain, a
likely example of this phenomenon, knew Troy Kastigar, a
Minneapolis man who died in 2009 in Somalia after joining an
Islamic extremist group. Both attended Robbinsdale Cooper High in
the late 1990s and the two were in a rap group together, according
to Mr. McCain's Facebook page.
In December 2012, Mr. McCain changed his profile image to honor
Mr. Kastigar.
Experts and former officials said the U.S. intelligence
community is better at tracking U.S. citizens once they have
entered Syria and begun fighting than in identifying them
beforehand and preventing them from going.
The U.S. can place those it has identified as fighting in Syria
on no-fly lists and can make it challenging for them to return to
the U.S.
Mr. McCain was on a travel watch list, a U.S. official said, and
the U.S. was aware that he was in Syria.
The U.S. can also indict citizens it finds have terrorist ties,
as it did in March. It arrested Nicholas Teausant, a 20-year-old
American citizen, in a sting operation near the U.S.-Canada border
in Washington state. The Justice Department said Mr. Teausant
planned to cross into Canada and travel to Syria to join a rebel
group.
Lisa Schwartz, Natalie Andrews and Siobhan Gorman contributed to
this article.
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