‘Network Effect’: ISIS is Still Gaining Foreign Recruits at an Alarming Rate

Despite Western efforts to counter extremism and terrorism recruiting, tens of thousands of foreigners have traveled to the Middle East to join groups like ISIS, The New York Times reports.

The number of people who have traveled to Iraq and Syria to join jihadist groups has doubled in the past year, according to The Times.

Intelligence analysts estimate that 30,000 foreigners have gone to the Middle East to try to join ISIS and other terrorist groups since 2011. A year ago, experts put that number at 15,000.

Western governments have been struggling to combat violent extremism in the social-media age. ISIS (also known as the Islamic State) has relied heavily on social media for radicalizing young people and enticing them to join their self-declared caliphate, the territory the group controls in Iraq and Syria.

These recruits sometimes convince family members and friends to come with them to live in what ISIS markets as an Islamic utopia. 

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“They claim to create this Islamic utopia, and Muslims are fleeing in droves,” Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a counterterrorism analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Business Insider earlier this month. 

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