No visitor to the Middle East can avoid noticing the yawning gap between the educational, entrepreneurial and occupational aspirations of the region's young people and the harsh reality that deprives so many of them of a positive future. Indeed, in the Middle East, half of those aged 18-25 are either unemployed or underemployed.
Aggravating this situation is the global refugee crisis, which has displaced some 30 million children, six million from Syria alone, very few of whom are likely to return home during their school-age years. It should come as no surprise that the Islamic State group believes that it can find fertile ground for recruitment in this vast population of dispossessed and disaffected young people.
IS propagandists are misusing social media in the way that their extremist predecessors and contemporaries have sometimes misused mosques — as a forum for radicalization. The group consistently posts content that challenges the possibility of coexistence between Islam and the West and calls young people to jihad.
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