THE US Government has released a graphic mock Islamic State (ISIS) recruitment video showing executions and crucifixions to discourage Americans from joining the group.
The video, which is part of the ‘Think Again, Turn Away’ anti-radicalisation project, uses gruesome images of executions, suicide bombings, floggings and corpses to make its point.
A parody of Isis’ own propaganda videos, it is called, Welcome to the ‘Islamic State’ land.
In one scene, men lying on the ground and surrounded by onlookers are shot dead at point-blank range and another uses footage of a suicide bomb in a mosque.
With more than 100 Americans believed to have joined the Islamist group in Iraq and Syria, where it is fighting a bloody campaign to establish a caliphate, the government has to do all it can to counter recruitment of Americans by Islamists.
Hundreds of foreign fighters, including up to 500 from Britain, are bolstering the militants’ ranks and the US and other countries are trying to stop more fanatics going.
The video was part of the ‘Think Again, Turn Away’ anti-radicalisation programme.
Dead bodies are shown nailed to crosses in mock crucifixions that ISIS has used to terrorise civilians in areas it controls and images of mass graves and headless corpses are shown.
Messages displayed between footage read: “You can learn useful new skills for the Ummah…blowing up mosques, crucifying and executing Muslims, plundering national resources, suicide bombings inside mosques.”
“Travel is inexpensive because you won’t need a return ticket,” it says before showing a body being thrown off a cliff.
On its facebook page, the US State Department said: “Our message is to expose the facts about terrorists and their propaganda.”
All footage was taken from ISIS’ own propaganda videos, which authorities around the world are constantly battling to remove from the internet.
Last week the Guardian reported that US law enforcement is investigating a new phenomenon of women from the American heartland joining Islamic State. According to a community leader Abdirizak Bihi, in the Minneapolis-St Paul area, at least three Somali families have female relatives who have gone missing in the past six weeks and may have tried to join Islamic State.
He said that while the reasons for their disappearance were unclear, he had told the families to contact police.
The Twin Cities area of Minnesota is home to the biggest Somali community in the United States, and it has been plagued by terrorist recruiting since the Somali group al-Shabaab began enlisting in America around 2007.
This year, law enforcement officials say they learned of 15-20 men with connections to the Minnesota Somali community fighting for extremist groups in Syria.
They included Douglas McAuthur McCain, a convert to Islam, who was killed in battle earlier this year.
In a separate case, a 19-year-old American Somali woman from St Paul sneaked away from her parents on August 25 saying she was going to a bridal shower. Instead, she flew to Turkey and joined IS (also known as Isis and Isil) in Syria. The St Paul woman is the first case of an area female joining ISIS that has been made public although her family have asked for her name to be kept private because it fears retaliation from Islamists.
According to the FBI, the St Paul woman is likely to have been recruited by IS through Islamist sympathisers in the United States.
At least one other woman is suspected of helping her leave the United States. Another US teenager, nurse’s aide Shannon Conley, 19, from Colorado, pleaded guilty this week to trying to travel to the Middle East to enrol in ISIS.
She was arrested at Denver international airport in April with a one-way ticket and had been recruited online by a male militant in Syria.
Mia Bloom, from the centre for terrorism and security studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, says through the monitoring of extremists’ social media accounts and other writings they have established that male jihadis regard women counterparts as little more than mating partners.
“ISIS is recruiting these women in order to be baby factories,” Bloom said.
“They are seeing the establishment of an Islamic state and now they need to populate the state.”
Scores of European Muslim women, mostly from Britain and France, have joined ISIS in the Middle East.
Some young foreign women have been deployed to Islamic State checkpoints in northern Syria where they pat down other women to search for weapons and force local females to abide by strict Islamic dress codes.
But snapshots on social media of the female jihadis’ lives in Syria more often show that, “the girls go around making cookies,” said Bloom.
“It’s almost like a jihadi Tupperware party.”
The main worry for law enforcement is that these males and females being recruited from America will one day return to the United States and attack targets.
An official from the FBI, Greg Boosalis has said that, “The obvious fear is of individuals coming back and committing a terrorist act here.”
He also revealed that the FBI has been working with the Somali community in Minnesota for years to help it combat radical Islamists.
The Islamic State has recruiters all over the Western world seeking out new members through social media or known jihadi supporters in Canada, Britain, the US and other largely non-Muslim nations.
Mubin Shaikh, a former Taliban recruiter who operated from his hometown of Toronto before becoming a national security operative in Canada, told International Business Times that, “Westerners are involved, especially in the recruitment and social media dissemination of the whole ISIS brand.
“Look at the videos they’re making.
“You think those people were trained in Syria and Iraq?
“Those people were trained in the West”
“There were certain things we looked for,” Shaikh said, speaking of his time as a recruiter.
“People who didn’t know the religion as much.”
Most Western recruits are teenagers and almost all going to Syria to fight are men. 
“The vast majority of Westerners joining up with ISIS are extraordinarily ignorant when it comes to religion,” said Max Abrahms, a North-eastern University professor who studies jihadist groups.
“Most recruits have no prior connection to Syria and never even thought to visit.”
How do you go from being a teenager in Middle-America to pledging allegiance to the bloodthirsty Islamic State?
There’s a lot of vetting along the way, terrorism experts said.
“People collaborating with ISIS can be ordinary people,” said Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, a Shillman-Ginsburg Fellow at the Middle East Forum.
“They don’t have to be religious fanatics.
“They could be anyone provided you give your pledge of allegiance to ISIS.”
During the past several years, while Christian immigration has decreased, Muslim immigration has increased, making Islam the second largest religion in the US after Christianity.
Freedom of religion and political correctness, along with tying the FBI’s and NYPD’s hands behind their backs in terms of investigating potential terror threats if it is deemed ‘racial profiling’, have combined to create a perfect storm.
The rise of the threat of American militants has also brought all kinds of bigots who believe that counter-terrorism is now politically incorrect.
The recent beheadings by ISIS of Americans James Foley, Steven Sotloff and Brit David Haines, mean that Islamic communities are not only under threat from extremists and recruiters among them, but ignorant and overzealous Americans who believe that every Muslim is a potential terrorist.
So what does this all mean for America and its Muslim population?
Can America survive a war abroad and a war at home?