E.L.D. Cornerstone.  Life in words & pictures

April 14, 2015

In the early hours of February 17, three schoolgirls from east London slipped out of their parents’ homes, made the trek to Gatwick airport and caught a flight to Istanbul. Shamima Begum, 15, Amira Abase, 15, and Kadiza Sultana, 16, waited 18 hours at a Turkish bus station before crossing the border into Syria, having been lured to the conflict zone by the Islamic State, the group commonly known as ISIS. And they aren’t alone. According to recent estimates, roughly 20,000 foreigners have joined the conflict in Iraq and Syria. Of those, 3,400 are from the West and many are young Muslims. Analysts largelycredit ISIS’s elaborate social media campaign for the recruitment effort. Begum, for one, had communicated online with an ISIS recruiter before leaving for Syria.

Thinks tanks, technology companies and government entities have all strived to better understand and counter ISIS’s digital strategy, with limited success. But one group sees hope in a method that hasn’t yet been tried: building more networking tools for the Muslim community. Affinis Labs, an incubator for startups, was co-founded by Shahed Amanullah, a self-proclaimed serial entrepreneur and former senior advisor for technology at the State Department, and Quintan Wiktorowicz, former senior director for community partnerships at the White House National Security Council. Its mission is to aggregate talented Muslim entrepreneurs to generate not-for-profit initiatives and full-fledged businesses that serve their community. Extremism is one of the more immediate social problems Affinis Labs wishes to address. “Part of the reason [ISIS’s campaign] is so effective is because it is organic, it’s from the audience that it is going after,” said Amanullah. “These young people understand youth frustration, they understand the fascination with violence, and they understand that the imagery and graphics that you see in Hollywood will attract these people.” Affinis Labs’s ideas spring from hackathons, which are held in venues around the world, from Abu Dhabi to Australia. At each event, participants are given a problem, such as how to make traditional Islamic scholarship relevant to the Twitter generation, and have three to four hours to come up with actionable solutions. The best of those ideas will receive help from Affinis Labs. So far, the incubator is working with two initiatives aimed at combating ISIS. The first is called One 2 One—an app to help identify people using overtly extremist rhetoric or imagery on social media. Young Muslims who are specially trained to counsel their peers can download the app, be connected to people supporting ISIS online and “talk them down from the ledge,” so to speak. “We’re looking for young Muslims who think they can get into that space and build a trusted relationship,” says Amanullah.

The second initiative is a website called “Come Back 2 Us,” which seeks to provide an underground railroad for people wishing to return home after joining ISIS. The site allows friends and family members to post messages to their loved ones abroad, in the hope the messages will trigger emotional responses. If foreign fighters change their minds about having joined ISIS, they will be able to click a panic button and provide information that will be sent to government contacts who can help them return home safely. Although the site is completely coded, there are a few kinks that need to be worked out before it goes live, none of which are technical. The creators want to make sure that the family members and friends are not targeted for posting on the site. Moreover, they want government guarantees that the fighters won’t be automatically locked up once they return. Denmark is trying its hand at rehabilitation programs for those returning from fighting alongside ISIS, while the Netherlands has either barred them from the country or forced them to wear tracking ankle bracelets. The U.S. doesn’t have a clear policy. Affinis Labs will wait for government assurance before activating the site in a country. “We can't convince them to come back when they will just go to jail,” says Amanullah. “And I don’t think we need to consign them to death or lifetime in jail because they made a stupid mistake.” If anything, the returned fighters could be an asset, he argues—they could warn their peers about the dangers of joining.

While the founders of Affinis Labs view Westerners joining ISIS as an issue in and of itself, they also see it as a symptom of a deeper-rooted problem. “I think a big reason young Muslims are vulnerable [to recruitment],” Amanullah says, “is because no one is defining their identity for them.… On one side you have ISIS using these simple, slick messages and on the other side you have clerics who stare into the camera and drone on for an hour. And one clearly resonates with young people and one clearly doesn’t.” Amanullah has spent much of his career building startups that target Muslims and carving out an online space for the community. Among his successes are Zabiha.com.