Once ISIS targets a victim, they constantly are communicating and engaging with the person, isolating them from society. In the The New York Times, writer Rukmini Callimachi tells a story of a young American woman named Alex who engaged in several conversations with ISIS. She was a lonely, troubled person and ISIS captured her attention by constantly contacting her. Alex once felt lonely and reclusive but, “now her iPhone was vibrating all day with status updates, notifications, emoticons and skype voicemail messages” (Callimachi). ISIS purposefully communicates with their victims constantly, creating a relationship with their targets online. When recruiting Alex, ISIS members “collectively spent thousands of hours engaging her over more than six months. …show more content…
ISIS spends countless hours talking and spending money on people to draw them into the organization. Alex expresses how she became friends with an ISIS member after talking to him everyday online while he was working to radicalize and recruit her. Alex said she “could not stay away from her online friend for long, though. Even though she had come to feel she couldn’t trust him, she still missed his companionship” (Callimachi). Alex became dependent on the ISIS member’s friendship online. This shows the clear effectiveness of ISIS’s ability to create relationships online with people while encouraging them to join their organization. A man named Mr. Shaikh, who spent years recruiting for extremist groups, stated,‘“We look for people who are isolated and if they are not isolated already, then we isolate them” (Calimachi). ISIS clearly uses tactics to further isolate their victims by constantly engaging and communicating with them. Therefore, ISIS targets troubled people who are already isolated from society, and works to fully detach them from their community through constant communication