ISIS Pays Recruiters $10 000 Per Person: United Nations

Added by Senior Reporter on October 17, 2015.
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Tags: Iraq, Islamic State, Syria, UN, United Nations

Senior ISIS recruiting figure reportedly a female Seattle teacher

The Islamic State group is paying supporters up to $10 000 for each person that they recruit to wage jihad in Syria and Iraq, UN experts says after a visit to Belgium, one of the main countries of origin for so-called foreign fighters.

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

The UN experts learned from Belgian contacts that 500 foreign fighters in Iraq and Syria originated in Belgium, the highest per capita of any EU country, she added.

“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 media conference in Brussels, adding the findings were preliminary.

“If somebody was well educated like computer specialists or doctors, they were paid more,” the Polish human rights lawyer added.

They had no figures on how many women had left Belgium, but said the number of boys and men departing for jihad had declined from about 10 per month three years ago to about four or five per month now.

Their average age is 23.