This Online Group of Former Islamic Extremists Deradicalizes Jihadists
Bloomberg
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Hannah, a British woman of Indian descent, joined a militant Muslim group when she was 18. Raised Hindu, she began studying Islam during her first year at a London university. On the suggestion of a fellow student named Rashad Ali, Hannah attended a campus meeting of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a group that espouses nonviolence in establishing a unified Islamic state but has been linked to murder and praises jihad…
Ali became a cyber jihadist at age 15. As an observant Muslim of Indian descent, he’d always felt isolated in Sheffield, his industrial English hometown. Following stints in Egypt, where he was trying to organize a coup, and Saudi Arabia, he returned to the U.K. to recruit students online, often by trolling digital forums and bulletin boards…
Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent who investigated several high-profile terrorism cases, says such online networks are becoming harder to infiltrate because radicals increasingly eschew YouTube and Twitter in favor of more private networks. And he questions the sway former radicals have on hardliners. “When they switch sides, they lose credibility,” he says …
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