Islamic State targeting Germany's young and vulnerable. Do you think this is happening here as well?

Last month in Baiji, Iraq, a 23-year-old German who's being referred to as Yannick N. died in a suicide bomb attack for the Islamic State.

The story of a young German man willing to fight and die for the Islamic State has become disturbingly routine, but to experts and police, the tale of Yannick N. is especially shocking because of what the former Freiburg resident didn't possess.

He didn't have close family or friends, the most common way Islamic State fighters are recruited. He didn't have Internet access and wasn't known to have ever used social media sites believed critical to Islamic State recruiters. He didn't have a home mosque, or a background in Islam, which again would make him a lower-risk target. He was homeless.

Instead, Yannick N., who was learning disabled, appears to have been approached in person and to have been recruited in what amounted to a cold call by radical Islamists targeting a vulnerable person by offering to give him what they had and he wanted — protection, a future and a family.

A year after that initial approach, he drove a truck filled with 1.5 tons of explosives into an Iraqi military checkpoint.

The news in Europe is full of such stories of people vanishing from here who end up there. Last weekend, a Hamburg father killed himself after learning that his teenage daughter and her friend had sneaked away and into Syria. British news media this week were reporting that three British sisters and their nine children are feared to have slipped into Syria after making a pilgrimage to Mecca.

German experts on the radicalization of young people say Yannick N. fits a new trend in the Islamic State recruiting. For years now, Germany, like other European nations, has provided a steady flow of recruits to the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. Most of those were young Muslims, many of them recent converts, who'd been radicalized by family, friends, imams or the Web.

The new strategy appears to target the homeless, those with disabilities and young, frustrated refugees. Experts believe that before, European recruits were often lured with the promise of taking part in a struggle that was bigger than their small, mundane lives. This new batch, however, is simply desperate for any kind of acceptance. As such, the fear is that they're more likely to be willing to accept their fate as suicide bombers than those who want glory, but also want to revel in it with friends online.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/islamic-state-targeting-germanys-young-and-vulnerable-in-worrying-recruiting-trend/ar-AAbNBsr