Federal agents have arrested nine Muslim men residing in Northern Virginia for terrorist activity. The arrests took place just a few miles away from the White House.
Many of the men arrested were recruited by ISIS fighters in Syria and Iraq through the dark web.
Online recruitment of young Muslim men in the United States has been all been perfected by the Islamic State. Employing computer savvy engineers and video production experts, ISIS has released a bevy of high-quality videos over the years targeting susceptible young Muslims with whispers of jihad.
The videos highlight the gifts of paradise only attainable through martyrdom operations, i.e. suicide bombings, truck-ramming attacks, and shooting sprees.
Some young would-be jihadis are introduced to ISIS propaganda by their local imam. Salafist-inspired mosques, particularly in Western Europe, have become hotbeds of jihadist activity. Fanatical preachers and self-professed Quranic scholars cite Islamic religious texts in the hopes of drawing as many Muslim hardliners as possible to their anti-Western campaigns. Praising the primacy of Sharia law, these preachers call for the deaths of apostates and heretics, including Christians and Jews.
US law enforcement officials have recently focused their attention on neighborhoods with a high-density of Muslim immigrants.
Minnesota in particular has been the site of multiple arrests. “The FBI arrested six residents of Somali origin in April after they made arrangements to leave Minnesota for Syria,” reported The Washington Times. “Last December, a 20-year-old man of Somali origin was arrested on accusations of leading a group of ethnic Somalis attempting to fight for the Islamic State.”
But the jihadist cancer is spreading. Look no further than the outskirts of Washington D.C.
