IS using social media to entice Canadian youth

OTTAWA — The Islamic State (IS) is proving more successful at attracting vulnerable Canadian youth to its cause than Al Qaeda was and terrorism experts attribute that in part to the group’s military success and its brash use of social media.

Canadians from cities as diverse as oil-hub Calgary to the northern mining town of Timmins have travelled to countries such as Syria to join the fighting, said security officials.

The police are monitoring about 90 other people who intend to go abroad to join militant groups or have come back.

The country’s decision on Oct 3 to begin air strikes against IS may have fuelled recruiting while, paradoxically, measures to stop them from leaving the country may be encouraging action at home, people who study terrorism say.

“It does seem in Canada that the ISIS situation resonates much more strongly than just the general Al Qaeda jihadi narrative,” said Mr Lorne Dawson, a professor and expert on radicalisation at the University of Waterloo, referring to the Islamic State by the initials of its former name, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. “They appear to be establishing an actual state, and their military success (says), in their mind-set, that God is on their side.”

The Islamic State’s sophisticated use of social media, including Twitter, YouTube and Tumblr, has had success widening the pool of potential fighters well beyond the Middle East, experts say.

“They seem to be able to catch or use new kinds of social media in order to foster radicalisation at home, which is something that Al Qaeda was never really able to accomplish,” said Mr Jean-Francois Ratelle, a Canadian visiting scholar at George Washington University who studies how young people become radicalised.

The presence of Western fighters in Iraq and Syria also give Islamic State the language skills and networks needed to reach people in Canada, Mr Ratelle said by phone from Ottawa. “The foreign fighters have been playing a major role in radicalising people,” he said.

Those Canadian fighters have, in turn, been particularly good at spreading the extremist message, according to University of Waterloo’s Mr Dawson.

“Everyone in the field had the sense that something was boiling,” he said. “We were entering into a new threatening era because of the appeal of ISIS, and the evidence of that was the rather large number of young Canadian men coming from places like Calgary, Timmins, Ontario — small communities — going overseas and being very vocal in their Twitter feeds, their Tumblr feeds, speaking out, making really shocking comments back against Canada.”

Officials were aware of at least 130 individuals in early 2014 with ties to Canada who were suspected of participating in terrorist activity, including training and fund-raising, said Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Steven Blaney on Oct 8 during hearings before a parliamentary committee in Ottawa.

“Some remain abroad,’’ he said. “We know of about 80 who have returned to Canada.”

Some terrorism experts say new laws and other measures to reduce the flow of Canadians into terrorist spots abroad may be backfiring by fanning the potential for attacks at home.

“The more recent ISIS Twitter feeds have been ‘if you can’t join us, take the action to where you are’,”’ said Mr Dawson.

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