ISIS is becoming creative in their outreach: US Ambassador to India Richard Verma

NEW DELHI: US Ambassador to India Richard Verma on Tuesday averred that ISIS is becoming creative in their outreach and its ability to disseminate ideologies online is a matter of global concern.

“Our adversaries are becoming more creative in their outreach. Until his death last month, German-born performer-turned-propagandist Denis Cuspert had led ISIS’s “Jihad Cool” rap-music effort. ISIS recently announced a radicalizing curriculum in public schools it has seized in Mosul,” Verma said at a workshop in the capital on Tuesday on “Opportunities for Public-Private Partnership in Countering Online Radicalization and Recruitment” days after the Paris terror strikes that has killed 130 people.

Referring to innovative methods employed by ISIS, the envoy noted, “…a new al-Qaeda recruitment video promises cost-free adventure travel, including tourism and big-game hunting, to prospective adherents. Terrorist groups project their toxic messages in a broad variety of ways and we need to understand them in order to counter their influence.”

Pointing out that the ability of terrorist groups like ISIL to disseminate ideologies capable of radicalizing a son, daughter, sister, or brother to violence is a matter of global concern, Verma said, “The challenges we face in countering online radicalization and recruitment are especially vexing because they give terrorist organizations opportunities to exploit national, institutional, professional, and language barriers that tend to separate us. We live in an age where a phone call from a recruiter in Syria can motivate a person to purchase a plane ticket in London for travel to join a terrorist enterprise via Turkey, through a transaction recorded on a server in California.”

“Violent extremists want us to turn against each other. As in Iraq, they will target societies where they think they have a chance of exploiting divisions. But as President Obama told a Kenyan audience this past summer, “extremists who prey on distrust must be defeated by communities who stand together and stand for something different.”