The number of young Europeans who decide to join jihadist groups is on the rise, reports Deutsche Welle.
Organized Islamists identify and indoctrinate young recruits at mosques in Europe or via the Internet, eventually sending them off to fight in war zones in the Middle East like Syria. "Emmanuel", a young Frenchman with long dark hair tied at the back, converted to Islam years ago. He said it wasn't an easy decision and that his search for truth led him to some dead ends.
Emmanuel said in the moderate mosques they told him to approach it calmly and take his time. "But I'm idealistic," he said. "The world is often unjust, and I wanted to move forward faster." Emmanuel started browsing the internet. "That's easy, one website leads to the next. And so I ended up on the extremists' pages and got on this bad trip." Emmanuel didn't want to be filmed in a way that his face would be shown. He is still in hiding.
Few people are willing to reveal they've had contact with extremist circles. Such contact is dangerous: once hooked, Islamistic preachers don't like to let people off their lines. The Internet is the meeting place. One of the people active on it is Omar Omsen, the number one Islamist agitator in France, whose propaganda videos get thousands of clicks: "We Muslims are a huge community, more than 1.5 billion people. Among us a very special chosen group is like the foam on the sea."
Omsen's rants have led some 700 young French people to take part in "holy war", or jihad, in Syria, according to official estimates. Most of them come from atheist families. The jihadists always use the same method online, showing the young people shocking images that paint the Western world as degenerate and corrupt. Emmanuel said he believed them. "People become convinced that there is a huge conspiracy among the Jews, the financial industry, and America. They develop a kind of paranoia and see evil everywhere."
Read more of this report from Deutsche Welle.