ISIS pays nothing to Indian recruits, but 10,000 US dollars for a Belgian

It is not all ideology after all. A report states that foreign fighters are paid up to 10,000 US dollars for recruiting people into the ISIS. There are three things that come to mind. The ISIS is very rich, people are willing to join terrorism not only for ideology, but money too and the ISIS is in need of people.

While the UN experts have made this claim that a huge sum of money is being to the recruiters, the Indian scenario is very different though.

None of the recruits have been paid any money and all of them have gone to the ISIS on their own will. Even the recruiters such as Shafi Armar who run the ISIS recruiting wing for India called the Ansar-ul-Tawhid gets the job done for free.

Why are Indians not paid to join the ISIS?

Indians in ISIS camps just add to the numbers. They do not do any real fighting. Moreover none of the Indian Muslims who have joined the ISIS have proved their mettle so far. Most of them have only posed in war clothes with guns and not really inflicted any damage either in Syria or Iraq.

An intelligence bureau official said that there is no doubt that the ISIS does want Indians in its fold. However if one looks at the manner in which they shop for a British or Belgian it is very different when compared to India.

The ISIS goes that extra mile to get fighters from UK or Belgium. However they have not launched any aggressive recruitment drive for India.

In most cases where Indians are concerned, they have gone on their own will and parked in Hind camps where they do odd jobs. The recent report by the Intelligence Bureau clearly states that they want Indians to launch lone wolf attacks in India.

This is more of a test exercise, the officer says while adding that they want to spread the propaganda in India fully instead of taking Indians on board for their war in Syria or Iraq.

How the ISIS shops for jihadis?

Elzbieta Karska, who chairs a UN group, said that the ISIS is using social media and informal networks of friends and family, with many of them in Syria, to recruit new jihadists in Belgium.

It was learnt that from Belgian contacts that 500 foreign fighters in Iraq and Syria originated in Belgium, the highest per capita of any EU country. "We have heard about situations where recruiters were paid from two, three thousand to 10,000 dollars depending on who was recruited," Karska told a press conference in Brussels.

If somebody was well educated like computer specialists or doctors, they were paid more. The Belgian-based extremist group Sharia4Belgium enlisted the first wave of recruits for Syria in 2010. With Sharia4Belgium now broken up and many of its members jailed, recruiting has changed.

In the last year, "the key method of recruitment is reportedly through informal networks of friends and family, and through social media.