Los Angeles: Aqsa Mahmoud grew up in an affluent part of Glasgow, Scotland, and attended a prestigious private school. She liked listening to the band Coldplay and reading Harry Potter books. Then at 19, she disappeared.
She later told her parents that she had crossed into Syria to join Daesh and was marrying one of its fighters.
In the year since then, she has turned up frequently on social networking sites touting the militant group’s attacks and encouraging more Western women to travel to Syria to help build a new nation based on its extreme interpretation of Islam. As recently as February 15, she is believed to have been in touch with 15-year-old Shamima Begum, one of three British teens who flew to Turkey two days later and who police said Tuesday have crossed the border into Syria.
Terrorism experts say Mahmoud is part of a sophisticated recruitment campaign that uses sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Ask.fm to lure Western women and girls to the war-torn country with a mix of extremist religious ideology and chatty posts about life in the militants’ self-proclaimed caliphate that are laced with emoticons and street slang.
In addition to the spiritual rewards of serving Allah, the women are promised husbands and homes including worldly items such as fridges, microwaves and milkshake machines, said Mia Bloom, a professor of security studies at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and author of Bombshell: Women and Terror. Bloom likened the exchanges to online grooming by sexual predators. “It’s not dissimilar ... in terms of disinhibiting them, creating a rapport, building trust, creating this environment of secrecy: ‘You don’t tell your parents, you can trust me,’” she said.
Hundreds are believed to have taken the bait. Many are second- or third-generation immigrants who do not have the religious education to question what they are being told about Sharia and practices, experts said. They are drawn to Syria by a sense of religious obligation, concern about the suffering inflicted on Muslim civilians in the country’s civil war, a desire for adventure and purpose and the romance of marrying a fighter.
http://m.gulfnews.com/news/reg...-militants-1.1462607
She later told her parents that she had crossed into Syria to join Daesh and was marrying one of its fighters.
In the year since then, she has turned up frequently on social networking sites touting the militant group’s attacks and encouraging more Western women to travel to Syria to help build a new nation based on its extreme interpretation of Islam. As recently as February 15, she is believed to have been in touch with 15-year-old Shamima Begum, one of three British teens who flew to Turkey two days later and who police said Tuesday have crossed the border into Syria.
Terrorism experts say Mahmoud is part of a sophisticated recruitment campaign that uses sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Ask.fm to lure Western women and girls to the war-torn country with a mix of extremist religious ideology and chatty posts about life in the militants’ self-proclaimed caliphate that are laced with emoticons and street slang.
In addition to the spiritual rewards of serving Allah, the women are promised husbands and homes including worldly items such as fridges, microwaves and milkshake machines, said Mia Bloom, a professor of security studies at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and author of Bombshell: Women and Terror. Bloom likened the exchanges to online grooming by sexual predators. “It’s not dissimilar ... in terms of disinhibiting them, creating a rapport, building trust, creating this environment of secrecy: ‘You don’t tell your parents, you can trust me,’” she said.
Hundreds are believed to have taken the bait. Many are second- or third-generation immigrants who do not have the religious education to question what they are being told about Sharia and practices, experts said. They are drawn to Syria by a sense of religious obligation, concern about the suffering inflicted on Muslim civilians in the country’s civil war, a desire for adventure and purpose and the romance of marrying a fighter.
http://m.gulfnews.com/news/reg...-militants-1.1462607
