When a lonely Virginia teenager named Ali Amin got curious about the Islamic State last year and went online to learn more, he found a virtual community awaiting. It had its own peculiar language, stirring imagery and just the warm camaraderie, sense of adventure and devotion to a cause that were missing from his dull suburban life.
At 17, the precocious son of a Yemeni immigrant family, he quickly developed online relationships with older IS supporters around the globe. There was Zubair in Britain, Uthman in South Africa and Abdullah in Finland, who urged him to start a Twitter account under the name AmreekiWitness, or American witness.
Amin drew several thousand followers, sparred online with the State Department, engaged with prominent IS propagandists and developed quite a name among English-speaking fans of the militants — until his arrest in March.
“For the first time, I felt I was not only being taken seriously about very important and weighty topics, but was actually being asked for guidance,” Amin wrote in August to the judge overseeing his case, expressing regret for what he portrayed as a disastrous youthful mistake.
“By assimilating into the Internet world instead of the real world, I became absorbed in a ‘virtual’ struggle while disconnecting from what was real: my family, my life and my future.” As the Obama administration takes on the multidimensional challenge posed by the IS after the killings in San Bernardino, California, the online community of sympathisers in the US is a critical focus. They number in the hundreds, experts say, and fit no single profile.
Chicago siblingsAmong those whose flirtations took a serious turn and led to criminal charges are a trio of teenage siblings from Chicago, a former Air Force mechanic in his late 40s from New Jersey, and a mother of two from Philadelphia. In fact, they have little in common except one thing: the weeks or months spent marinating in the rhetoric and symbolism of the IS, courtesy of Twitter and other Internet platforms.
It is in this electronic hothouse of mutual support, a sort of round-the-clock pep rally for a cause most Muslims shun, that Americans join other English speakers to try out defiant screen names, throw around Arabic words they have often just learned, and seek to outdo one another in pious zeal. Some merely express anger at U.S. foreign policy or at what they see as mistreatment of Muslims overseas. Others go further, trying to reach IS territory or plotting violence at home.
Like most heady American romances with the IS, Amin’s came to a crashing halt. In late August, he was sentenced to 11 years in prison after pleading guilty to material support for a terrorist group. Americans who managed to reach Syria have suffered a still grimmer fate, dying on distant battlefields. And last week, in California, two admirers of the extremist group were shot dead by the police after attacking an office holiday gathering and killing 14 people. The full story of the radicalisation of the attackers, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, is still emerging as the FBI retrieves records from deleted computer drives and smashed cellphones.
“It’s a closed community — almost a clique,” said Seamus Hughes, co-author of a report, “ISIS in America,” released last week by George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. The University report underscored the diversity of the 71 people in the U.S. charged with crimes related to the IS since March 2014: 40 per cent were converts to Islam. They were young, with an average age of 26; overwhelmingly U.S. citizens or legal residents; and 14 per cent were women.
But all, or nearly all, had spent hours on the Internet trumpeting their feelings about the IS. In fact, nearly all were arrested after their online posts drew the attention of the FBI. — New York Times News Service
