The number of teenagers arrested on terrorism charges is growing in Europe. How is the extremist “Islamic State” group, with branches in Africa and Afghanistan, convincing European teens to attack its enemies?
The Austrian teenager who was shot dead last week after firing a vintage rifle at German police in Munich is thought to have been influenced by Islamist extremism. But 18-year-old Emrah I., from a small town in the Salzburg region, hardly attended his local mosque, nor did he grow a beard or wear a long gown.
The only clue that might have predicted his behavior in Munich was in early 2023, when Austrian police, investigating complaints about a fight at his school, found videos from a computer game on his phone. In these, he had decorated scenes with anAl Qaeda flag.
But after finding nothing else, police now believe that in the intervening months, the teenager was radicalized online.
Numbers of teen terrorists growing
He is not alone. Between March 2023 and March 2024, researchers at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy counted 470 relevant legal cases related to the extremist “Islamic State” (IS) group. Teenagers or minors were involved in at least 30 of those, with the report adding that “this number may be significantly higher given that many nations do not release age data for arrestees.”
Another study, led by Peter Neumann, a professor of security studies at King’s College in London, looked at 27 recent IS-related cases and found that almost two-thirds of the linked arrests in Europe were of teenagers.
