Seven fitness influencers were arrested in Spain on January 20th, suspected of jihadist indoctrination. The arrests, the result of a months-long investigation, took place in several Spanish cities, although the operations are not all connected. At least one of those arrested had more than 100,000 followers on platforms such as Instagram and YouTube where, for years, he had been teaching self-defence, fitness training, and calisthenics routines. Recently, he had begun to use his huge network to intersperse videos with exclusively religious, anti-Western, and proselytising themes.
The arrested fitness influencers all had in common that they used nasheeds (Islamic hymns) to accompany their training routines. According to the Spanish police, these were hymns with a significant power of indoctrination, many of them having been created by the Islamic State’s multimedia machinery.
Music platforms like SoundCloud or YouTube have hundreds of playlists of nasheeds for fitness routines. They are vocal compositions, without instrumentation, very suggestive, repetitive, and powerfully motivating—almost like a mantra—with lyrics that include belligerent messages, calls to arms against the enemies of Islam, or hate speech against the West. Many of the most well-known ones were created by the Islamic State, although those who train with them in the background are often unaware of their connection to the jihadist cause. “Let my enemies be strong and brave, so that I feel no remorse in defeating them” or “The word is the word of the sword, so that tyrants may be avenged” are examples of jihadist nasheeds that are becoming popular across Europe, camouflaged within the context of sports training.
According to investigators, the content creators used their influence over younger followers to indoctrinate them in Islamism through private groups on different social networks. In turn, the followers of these leaders amplified the message by delivering jihadist and Islamic State propaganda videos to millions of young people through the management of numerous social media profiles.
Video games and jihadism
It is not only the world of fitness that has become a new form of veiled indoctrination. Police are also closely monitoring a very similar phenomenon in the field of video games. Gamers are taking advantage of their huge communities of 11-18-year-old followers and broadcasting videos of suicide bombings, Islamic State beheadings, and other violent content and jihadist propaganda.
Several Discord communities are currently actively dedicated to this task. The administrators of these private groups communicate in English or Arabic, but almost all are based in countries such as Spain, France, or Germany. The reason why they have chosen this user-to-user chat platform is because it defends the right to confidentiality of chats, and only agrees to review messages hosted on its servers when there are several reports from other users.
Access to these gaming and jihadist groups is highly restricted, and the first requirement is to accept the religious precepts of their creators, including the prohibition of communication between men and women, or a ban on homosexuals. Although the initial proposal, often aimed at minors, is to play together online, these groups end up becoming endless forums filled with Islamic State propaganda.
Several of those arrested in Spain had vast amounts of jihadist multimedia material, with a particular obsession for videos of suicide bombings.
Fame in the service of jihad
It is not the first time that Islamists have used unexpected subterfuges to optimise the recruitment of new followers, but the power of influencers specialising in specific subjects—be it music, sport or, games—is of particular concern to Europol, which has collaborated with the Spanish police in recent operations. The goal is to dismantle them as soon as possible to prevent them from reaching more people or radicalising their messages.
Last February, Algerian influencer Zazou Youssef was sentenced to 18 months in prison for inciting jihadist terrorism on TikTok and encouraging attacks on European soil. The 25-year-old expert on political and social commentary on Algeria and its diaspora had nearly 400,000 followers. He was arrested in January when, in one of his posts, he called for the use of weapons on January 1st against enemies of the Algerian regime in France and Algeria.
A similar case is that of Imadtintin, another Algerian influencer arrested in France for editing and translating videos, one of which encouraged “burning alive, killing, and raping on French soil”.
In Belgium, too, several arrests and monitoring operations have been carried out in recent months in Telegram groups, TikTok accounts, and Facebook groups where Islamic State recruiters are gaining access to ever younger people. If these minors connect with ISIL/ISIS’s violence-glorifying message, they are more likely to become quickly radicalised and, though they may not always contemplate planning real attacks in the short term, they do become digital loudspeakers that replicate jihadist content and slogans over networks, reaching a huge adolescent audience across Europe.
Perhaps this explains why a King’s College London study of arrests for ties to Islamic State over the past nine months on European soil found that 38 of the 58 arrested were teenagers aged 13-19.
What happened last December is an example of this, when German police arrested a 17-year-old Turkish-German boy who wanted to die as a martyr in a jihadist attack. In a chat room of Islamic State sympathisers he announced that he wanted to bomb “consular buildings” and behead infidels, and a police search of his home found a liquid made of a mixture of lighter fluid and disinfectants. Days before his arrest, he had said in a chat room that he planned to commit a mass shooting like the one in Nice in 2016, on the 20th or 21st December.
A regular report by the Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung has been monitoring jihadist activity on social media since 2019, and warns that “content creators belonging to the Islamist or Salafist spectrum” are using YouTube “to gain dominance over the narrative in Germany”. They explain that searching for “simple Islamic terms” leads to channels that “spread implicitly extremist narratives” and “always appear among the first results”
Its aim is ultimately to indoctrinate “teenagers and young people seeking an interpretation of Islam” to accept that their religion “demands an active separation from society”, giving rise to a kind of “Islamic counterculture”. Monitoring shows that, if in 2019 the battleground was YouTube, it later shifted first to Instagram, and today, indoctrination occurs mainly on networks like TikTok.
From Push-Ups to Propaganda: Fitness and Gaming Used as Islamist Recruiting Tools
Seven fitness influencers were arrested in Spain on January 20th, suspected of jihadist indoctrination. The arrests, the result of a months-long investigation, took place in several Spanish cities, although the operations are not all connected. At least one of those arrested had more than 100,000 followers on platforms such as Instagram and YouTube where, for years, he had been teaching self-defence, fitness training, and calisthenics routines. Recently, he had begun to use his huge network to intersperse videos with exclusively religious, anti-Western, and proselytising themes.
The arrested fitness influencers all had in common that they used nasheeds (Islamic hymns) to accompany their training routines. According to the Spanish police, these were hymns with a significant power of indoctrination, many of them having been created by the Islamic State’s multimedia machinery.
Music platforms like SoundCloud or YouTube have hundreds of playlists of nasheeds for fitness routines. They are vocal compositions, without instrumentation, very suggestive, repetitive, and powerfully motivating—almost like a mantra—with lyrics that include belligerent messages, calls to arms against the enemies of Islam, or hate speech against the West. Many of the most well-known ones were created by the Islamic State, although those who train with them in the background are often unaware of their connection to the jihadist cause. “Let my enemies be strong and brave, so that I feel no remorse in defeating them” or “The word is the word of the sword, so that tyrants may be avenged” are examples of jihadist nasheeds that are becoming popular across Europe, camouflaged within the context of sports training.
According to investigators, the content creators used their influence over younger followers to indoctrinate them in Islamism through private groups on different social networks. In turn, the followers of these leaders amplified the message by delivering jihadist and Islamic State propaganda videos to millions of young people through the management of numerous social media profiles.
Video games and jihadism
It is not only the world of fitness that has become a new form of veiled indoctrination. Police are also closely monitoring a very similar phenomenon in the field of video games. Gamers are taking advantage of their huge communities of 11-18-year-old followers and broadcasting videos of suicide bombings, Islamic State beheadings, and other violent content and jihadist propaganda.
Several Discord communities are currently actively dedicated to this task. The administrators of these private groups communicate in English or Arabic, but almost all are based in countries such as Spain, France, or Germany. The reason why they have chosen this user-to-user chat platform is because it defends the right to confidentiality of chats, and only agrees to review messages hosted on its servers when there are several reports from other users.
Access to these gaming and jihadist groups is highly restricted, and the first requirement is to accept the religious precepts of their creators, including the prohibition of communication between men and women, or a ban on homosexuals. Although the initial proposal, often aimed at minors, is to play together online, these groups end up becoming endless forums filled with Islamic State propaganda.
Several of those arrested in Spain had vast amounts of jihadist multimedia material, with a particular obsession for videos of suicide bombings.
Fame in the service of jihad
It is not the first time that Islamists have used unexpected subterfuges to optimise the recruitment of new followers, but the power of influencers specialising in specific subjects—be it music, sport or, games—is of particular concern to Europol, which has collaborated with the Spanish police in recent operations. The goal is to dismantle them as soon as possible to prevent them from reaching more people or radicalising their messages.
Last February, Algerian influencer Zazou Youssef was sentenced to 18 months in prison for inciting jihadist terrorism on TikTok and encouraging attacks on European soil. The 25-year-old expert on political and social commentary on Algeria and its diaspora had nearly 400,000 followers. He was arrested in January when, in one of his posts, he called for the use of weapons on January 1st against enemies of the Algerian regime in France and Algeria.
A similar case is that of Imadtintin, another Algerian influencer arrested in France for editing and translating videos, one of which encouraged “burning alive, killing, and raping on French soil”.
In Belgium, too, several arrests and monitoring operations have been carried out in recent months in Telegram groups, TikTok accounts, and Facebook groups where Islamic State recruiters are gaining access to ever younger people. If these minors connect with ISIL/ISIS’s violence-glorifying message, they are more likely to become quickly radicalised and, though they may not always contemplate planning real attacks in the short term, they do become digital loudspeakers that replicate jihadist content and slogans over networks, reaching a huge adolescent audience across Europe.
Perhaps this explains why a King’s College London study of arrests for ties to Islamic State over the past nine months on European soil found that 38 of the 58 arrested were teenagers aged 13-19.
What happened last December is an example of this, when German police arrested a 17-year-old Turkish-German boy who wanted to die as a martyr in a jihadist attack. In a chat room of Islamic State sympathisers he announced that he wanted to bomb “consular buildings” and behead infidels, and a police search of his home found a liquid made of a mixture of lighter fluid and disinfectants. Days before his arrest, he had said in a chat room that he planned to commit a mass shooting like the one in Nice in 2016, on the 20th or 21st December.
A regular report by the Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung has been monitoring jihadist activity on social media since 2019, and warns that “content creators belonging to the Islamist or Salafist spectrum” are using YouTube “to gain dominance over the narrative in Germany”. They explain that searching for “simple Islamic terms” leads to channels that “spread implicitly extremist narratives” and “always appear among the first results”
Its aim is ultimately to indoctrinate “teenagers and young people seeking an interpretation of Islam” to accept that their religion “demands an active separation from society”, giving rise to a kind of “Islamic counterculture”. Monitoring shows that, if in 2019 the battleground was YouTube, it later shifted first to Instagram, and today, indoctrination occurs mainly on networks like TikTok.
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