The ISIS Peril by Kabir Taneja

Author:Kabir Taneja [Taneja, Kabir]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789353057114
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2019-11-08T00:00:00+00:00

‘The ISIS Pool’

It is theorized that the period of transition of an individual from thinking about radicalization to acting upon it is perhaps the only time when law enforcement can act as an intervention to stop an impending act of terror. The advent of technology, the internet and ease of global communication has also made it easier for potential recruits to get in touch with like-minded individuals with relative ease. As ISIS was growing in geography in both Syria and Iraq, individuals who identified with the idea of khilafat looked for each other online to discuss the ideology and mostly plan their respective travels to the Islamic State.

Due to the fact that social media platforms were slow to respond to their products being used to further jihadist causes, a lot of the initial attempts to collect online for this went unchecked, and the few ‘security’ systems the platforms had to fight against basic threats were easy to game via multiple IDs and false accounts.

Many cases in India, in fact, most, under investigation are of people propagating ISIS ideology, and not necessarily moving across borders to try and join the caliphate. However, there is another side to this discourse, that of Indians not just looking to join ISIS but Indians becoming one of the premier online recruiters for ISIS itself.

As a journalist, with most of my bandwidth concentrated towards following the developments in Iraq and Syria, South Asia was an interesting ‘failure’ for ISIS as despite the number of Muslims residing in the region, no major organisation of ISIS was formed in the region other than Afghanistan. This was, sort of, a watershed moment for those who covered terrorism, specifically that from a global perspective and not just the Pakistan theatre. It is rare to witness the rise of a terror group with the amount of gusto that ISIS came up with, making it on global front-pages within months of its existence as the ‘Islamic State’ and using the internet like no other before to digitally command and conquer.

Getting access to these online groups of ISIS sympathizers became a sort of race amongst journalists themselves during the rise of ISIS. Who would cover this new terror group, seemingly the most heinous in the world, willing to talk to the press, marketing itself and revelling in the spotlight being offered by the world as they murdered, decapitated, raped, and burned citizens of both Iraq and Syria? In one of the online pro-ISIS groups I managed to enter earlier, with the help of another journalist who got in thanks to an articulate and internet-savvy ISIS sympathizer from Europe. Many journalists and researchers alike were getting access to these groups, as a proper crackdown by social media platforms against these ecosystems was yet a few years away. In fact, it was in 2013 when one could say the first proper use of social media for an act of terror took place when the group Al Shabaab, an Al Qaeda-aligned outfit operating in eastern Africa, live-tweeted an attack by its members on the upscale Westgate Mall in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi.

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