British FM says Islamic State recruiting British youth in pandemic

By AFP 4 March 2021, 7:11 pm

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The Islamic State group and other terror organizations are recruiting young people in the UK in “worrying numbers,” British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab warns.

Speaking in the UK parliament, Raab says the country’s counter-terrorism referral unit saw a seven percent rise in the volume of terrorist content found online in the year up to December 2020.

Britain’s Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab arrives for a meeting with then-US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at 10 Downing Street in London, January 30, 2020. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

He adds that British police are seeing “a worrying rise in the proportion of children and teenagers that are now being arrested for terrorism offenses.”

Britain has grappled to contain the threat posed by IS after hundreds of UK nationals traveled to the Middle East and joined the terror group after 2014.

He calls the “accessibility of terrorist content online” during lockdown “a perfect storm” because it gives terrorists “digital access to those who are probably the most susceptible to extremist narratives.”