Jihadist message reaching younger audience through social media: expert

The arrest of a 15-year-old Montreal boy on terror-related offences suggests jihadist propaganda is reaching a younger audience, probably through social media, an expert on terrorism says.

The teen, who can’t be named under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, made a second court appearance on Thursday and pleaded not guilty to staging a robbery to fund terrorist activity (Criminal Code Section 83.2) and for planning to leave the country to participate in terrorism (83.181).

He’s among the youngest ever charged in Canada with a terror-related crime, the same age as one of four youths arrested as part of the 2006 Toronto 18 terror plot, though charges against that unnamed 15-year-old were later dropped. He’s also the first youth to be charged under the Conservative government’s newly minted Section 83.181.

For adults, the charges carry a maximum 10 years if convicted of terror-related travel and life for criminal activity tied to terrorism.

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The RCMP news release on the arrest provided little information and a spokesman at national headquarters wouldn’t comment. But CTV News reported police in Montreal saying the boy’s father turned him in after suspecting he had become radicalized.

It’s alleged he robbed a convenience store of $2,000 in October and hid the money in the backyard of his home, where his dad found it. Investigators later turned up jihadist propaganda material and videos on the teen’s computer.

The RCMP spokesman also would not say whether the Mounties have any other minors on their watch list of potential terror suspects, which numbers more than 90 people.

Arrested teen’s age surprising

The teen’s age came as a surprise to Neil Shortland, a senior research associate at the Center for Terrorism and Security Studies, Criminal Justice at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.

The center’s research into terrorism going back 25 years shows the average age rarely drops below 16 or 17, Shortland told Yahoo Canada News. The pattern actually is similar to the age distribution for crime generally, he said.

"They peak around the late teens and the early twenties and then they decay," Shortland said in an interview.

"It’s not to say young individuals aren’t involved in terrorism in any way," he said. "The IRA [Irish Republican Army] we know integrated young people. Insurgencies abroad, the Taliban, etcetera, they often bring in young people."

But the ability to attract younger teens in a society not acculturated to terrorism would be a new phenomenon.

"The question about this that makes it interesting is in some of those cases … what they do is they’re looking at the idea of kind of grooming and coercion into these roles, whereas what we’re seeing here is that self-starting model of someone stepping up to the plate and self-generating without direct contact," Shortland explained.

"That’s a very different process, as you can imagine. Being surrounded by a culture and a group, it’s very easy to become integrated into something like terrorism when there’s a culture supporting it.

"But to be geographically distant from it and yet to still come to that conclusion and generate the motivation to become involved at this young an age I would say is something relatively different, especially when it involves the act of attempting to travel abroad.”

Ottawa-based security expert Michel Juneau-Katsuya said the same kinds of messages that lure young men in their late teens and early twenties abroad can certainly attract younger teens.

Groups like Islamic State (ISIS) also have not been shy about appealling to children as young as six in territories they occupy, he said.

“They understand that any child in their development are at any stage up to their twenties very influenceable, and even after their twenties, depending on the personalities of the people,” said Juneau-Katsuya, a former counter-terrorism co-ordinator with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and president of the consulting firm Northgate Group.

Jihadists have become adept at social media

For Shortland, the case is a warning sign that extremist messages are reaching a younger audience, especially via social media such as Twitter, Facebook or Instagram.

"Look at that and where these groups are now modelling and putting out their propaganda," he said. "They’re matching a much younger audience.

"If you look about five or six years ago, terrorist communications … were getting thrown around the Islamic awakening web sites and forums. They were attracting an audience of slightly older, slightly more educated discussing these concepts."

Young teens are more apt to be on popular social media networks, he said.

Shortland pointed to the case in October of three Denver teenage girls intercepted in Germany on their way to Turkey in hopes of joining Islamic State. The girls, aged 15 to 17, had taken their passports and lifted US$2,000 from their families to make the journey, tweeting their plans.

Friends reported the tweets to school officials, who in turn contacted the FBI. The girls were returned to the custody of their parents without charges, unlike the Montreal teen who’s being held in detention and facing a psychiatric evaluation.

“We don’t have a lot of detail about his personal life but I wouldn’t be surprised that this is a kid that has already trouble fitting in [with] his family and with his friends,” said Juneau-Katsuya.

It’s unlikely the boy would have been able to make the trip unless he already had a passport, he added.

"I’m quite sure this was very poorly thought, poorly planned and done with a lot of naivete and stupidity that comes with that age group," he said.

But Shortland also warned that such evidence of the jihadist message reaching a younger audience shows the need move education about extremism into the school system.

Confronting extremist messages before people can act on them – known in counter-terrorism circles as “left of bang” – requires a community-based approach, not the police who are often too stretched or ill-equipped to undertake it, he said. It’s begun to happen, especially in Muslim communities but needs a wider reach, he said.

"We now need to pull it even further back and start to ingrain it in the schools," Shortland said. "We need to really bring it into the grass roots of these educational programs. The Internet is a wild west for children who go on without control.”