Muslim Leaders in U.S. Seek to Counteract Extremist Recruiters

STERLING, Va. — Imam Mohamed Magid tries to stay in regular contact with the teenager who came to him a few months ago — at his family’s urging — to discuss how he was being wooed by online recruiters working for the Islamic State, the extremist group in Syria and Iraq.

But the imam, a scholar bursting with charm and authority, has struggled to compete. Though he has successfully intervened in the cases of five other young men, persuading them to abandon plans to fight overseas, the Islamic State’s recruiting efforts have become even more disturbing, he said, and nonstop.

“The recruiters wouldn’t leave him alone,” Imam Magid said of the young man he met with recently. “They were on social media with him at all hours, they tweet him at night, first thing in the morning. If I talk to him for an hour, they undo him in two hours.”

President Obama on Wednesday described the fight against violent extremism as a “generational challenge” that would require the cooperation of governments, religious leaders, educators and law enforcement. But even before he called on more than 60 nations to join the effort, the rise of the Islamic State and the attacks by homegrown terrorists in Paris, Ottawa, Copenhagen and Sydney, Australia, had jolted American Muslims into action.

Muslim leaders here and elsewhere have already started organizing or expanding prevention programs and discussions on countering violent extremism, often with assistance from law enforcement officials and trained counter-recruiters who emphasize that the Internet’s dangers for young Muslims now go far beyond pornography.

With the Islamic State in particular deploying savvy online appeals to adolescents alongside videos of horrific executions, the sense of urgency has grown. Though some Muslim leaders still resist cooperating with government, fearing that they would be contributing to religious profiling and anti-Muslim bigotry, many have been spurred to respond as they have come into contact with religiously ardent youths, who feel alienated by life in the West and admit that they have been vulnerable to the Islamic State’s invitation to help build a puritanical utopia.

Imam Magid, speaking upstairs at his Muslim center while a team of Muslim girls pounded out a basketball game below, said that real prevention meant programs that give young people as much purpose and inspiration as extremists promise.

Once young Muslims buy into the ideology, he said, it’s very hard to pry them loose. “You have to reach them before it happens.”

Some of the Muslim parents in Avon, Conn., also said they were still trying to grasp how they could help. At one point, in a meeting at the Farmington Valley American Muslim Center with prosecutors, the police and an F.B.I. agent, Dr. Atique A. Mirza, a cardiologist and founding board member of the center, pointedly asked what they were up against. “What’s the proportion of recruiters to counter-recruiters?” he asked Ms. Khan.

Globally, she said, “the recruiters are orders of magnitude more.”

“It’s pathetic,” she said. “They are running circles around us.”

The New York Times