In the first five months of the year, prosecutors in Austria have brought criminal charges against 14- to 17-year-old supporters of the Islamic State (IS) on average every three days.

This has been revealed to Kronen Zeitung by sources in the judicial system.

The phenomenon of terrorist planning in the children’s room is a source of deep concern for intelligence services around the world, according to the Austrian newspaper.

They are very young and are quickly being radicalised by online hate preachers posing as Islamic influencers via social media such as TikTok and mobile phones – that is the common denominator that intelligence services around the world are registering with increasing frequency. The figures on the development are also alarming in Austria.

The phenomenon has spread after the Hamas terror against Israel:

The influx of radical Islamist human traffickers has increased further following the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel in October 2023. There is an “increasingly loud background noise” in various encrypted Messenger channels. In intelligence parlance, this denotes increased terrorist activity.

An intelligence report from 2024 shows that half of the terror suspects were young people. Half also do not have Austrian citizenship. Four out of ten are women. The regions with the highest concentration of jihadists are Upper Austria, Lower Austria and Vienna.

The security problems represented by jihadists risk increasing sharply with the fall of the Assad regime in Syria. According to Kronen Zeitung, there are 10,000 ISIS supporters in prison camps in the conflict area and the situation is unclear.