The attack on a cartoon contest last weekend in Texas is the latest reminder that the Islamic State’s sophisticated use of social media has greatly broadened the extremists’ reach into U.S. society to the point where “lone wolf” attackers can be inspired to commit terrorism without an apparent connection to — or support from — any organization.
And U.S. law enforcement is still trying to catch up with this new phenomenon.
“The danger is real. In many respects the threat is growing” in spite of setbacks for the extremist group on the battlefields in Iraq and Syria, said Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. “They’re using social media to show they’re actually stronger than they are.”
After the May 3 attack, the Islamic State followed up with an ominous message posted anonymously on a social media message board claiming credit for the incident and warning of more to come.
“We have 71 trained soldiers in 15 different states ready at our word to attack any target we desire,” the message read.
Perhaps even more troubling was that authorities aren’t sure whether that’s true — or how to find the “soldiers” being recruited on social media before they strike.
‘We have no knowledge of whether this is true or not,” Johnson said.
“The haystack is the entire country. We are looking for the needles, but increasingly the needles are unavailable to us,” FBI Director James Comey told reporters. “This is the ‘going dark’ problem in living color. There are Elton Simpsons out there that I have not found and I cannot see.”
Authorities say Elton Simpson, 30, and his roommate, Nadir Soofi, 34, traveled from Phoenix to the Dallas suburb of Garland, Texas, to attack an exhibit of cartoons depicting the Muslim prophet Muhammad after having become radicalized by Islamist extremist propaganda on social media. They were shot dead by a guard before they could carry out their intended attack.
Many Muslims are uncomfortable with depictions of Muhammad, even respectful ones, because they believe such things contribute to the sin of idolatry. Islamist extremists have reacted violently to such images, and organizers of the event were trying to show they would not be intimidated by terrorism.
Social media “is a new development in the way jihadist terrorists are recruiting in the United States,” said Peter Bergen, a terrorism analyst with the New America Foundation.
Bergen said researchers at the think tank have identified 62 people in 19 states from public records or news reports who have joined the Islamic State, al Qaeda or another terrorist group, tried to join them or aided others in doing so. Many of them are young women — a relatively new phenomenon, he said.
The Islamic State is the most successful of the terrorist groups due to an innovative and aggressive approach that has given the group an unprecedented ability to encourage like-minded followers to conduct attacks without the usual social support of an active terrorist infrastructure, said J.M. Berger, a terrorism analyst at the Brookings Institution.
The Islamic State “in many ways appears to be the first jihadist group to kind of crack the ‘lone wolf’ formula,” he said, using a mixture of populism and extremely violent imagery portraying the group as action-oriented and dynamic.
“Their message is they’re winners and you should join us because we’re strong,” Berger said.
Comey said the group has used Twitter heavily to identify likely supporters, later steering them into encrypted venues where they cannot be as easily tracked.
But even those identified as extremists can fall through the cracks. Both Soofi and Simpson were known to law enforcement before they attempted their attack, but were not judged to have been a threat until just three hours prior, when the FBI sent out a bulletin to law enforcement on Simpson.
Mubin Shaikh, a former extremist and undercover investigator for Canadian authorities who now works to dissuade others from joining groups like the Islamic State, said one way to identify and stop radicalization is for more former extremists to come forward. But to do that, they need encouragement to step up and tell their stories.
“There are others like me out there, they just don’t know how to come forward,” said Shaikh, author of Undercover Jihadi.
He said his own change of heart “came at a lot of personal cost…I think a lot of people may not be ready to do that.”
