FSB officers have detained young people who threatened to blow up a branch of Sberbank on behalf of the Daesh terrorist group in Moscow. They were leaving notes on behalf of representatives of radical Islamists. The psychological motivation of the young people who play at being terrorists or really join Daesh was explained by Police Colonel Marianna Kochubey, Chairwoman of the Scientific Advisory Board of the CIS ATC: “An individual who is exposed to influence, wants to withdraw from the periphery of the social field. He wants to become a member of a group which the society must recognize. This is a very serious motivation for young people. We are talking about background phenomenon, de-socialization, the loss of values, affiliation to a certain group, and things that are purely subjective. It is not a resource state of the individuals recruited: poverty, divorce, unrequited love.”
Sketching a portrait of recruited young people, experts speak about a weakened filter of critical perception of reality. “Young people who have a so-called 'small world map' are very easy to recruit. If a young man has travelled, studied, observed, talked, he has quite an extensive world map, he perceives reality quite critically,” Kochubey says.
Most recruitments are carried out on social networks today. “90% of electronic resources, in which the recruitments are being carried out, are outside of the CIS member-states. That is, they are physically located on servers of other territories. It is quite difficult to close them. Nevertheless, it is possible to work with it. Professional recruiters have been taught to gather information on persons through social networks long time ago. In other words, in fact, people spread information about themselves, which actually should not be spread. And it is important for the recruiter, that the young man is interesting in terms of his professional affiliation, those skills he has already mastered while studying at university, but at the same time he reacts to significant social, political events in society extremely, in an extremist way, expressing extremist comments. It is possible to create a psychological profile of the person through his social network page within an hour. If people are doing it professionally, they do it quite quickly.”
The psychologist also explains how the effect of the attractiveness of evil works: “The basis of this ideological background is the idea of a global clash of good and evil in the city of Dabik, that is why Daesh fights so hard for this territorial object. And by the false mythology, which was in fact debunked by imams, and muftis are saying this directly, that it is a very serious distortion of the idea of justice, which is the basis of both the Christian and Islamic religions. And if a young man believes that justice, for example, in relation to him or in relation to large population groups, has been violated, then, obeying his better judgment, he may be involved in the activities of the terrorist organization.”
Today, online recruiting is widespread – involvement in terrorist extremist organizations through computer games. “The Big Game: "Break the System" is recognized as an extremist resource in accordance with the law. When we analyzed the content carefully, it became obvious that it is about the monitoring of extremist sentiments among young people, and the monitoring of those areas or large cities, where there is at least some percentage of young people who are willing to commit violent acts of an extremist nature. Let's assume that this game offered to perform acts offline, upload reports online. Given points given were converted into money later. They offered stencils, street propaganda, signs of Svarog and so on. There was a storyline. It was suggested to make diversions at transport and leave signs of 'The Big Game' to prove that you are its participant, public executions against ethnic groups, representatives of Asian nations. There were such things as instructions for the creation of improvised explosive devices and their installation near the entrances of homes, in the areas adjacent to the buildings of the authorities,” Marianna Kochubey says.
She reminds that criminal punishment is quite real for such activities: “Some members of the extremist group 'Northern Brotherhood' were sentenced for crimes directly stipulated by the criminal law precisely in the framework of this game. They committed acts that were offered by the authors of the game in real life. We offer the heads of universities, parents, pedagogical collectives, to pay attention to the content of online games, through which the recruitment to terrorist and extremist organizations can be achieved.”
