Dutch Report Says Militants Being Drafted

The Netherlands’ next generation of Islamic militants is being recruited, trained and brainwashed right at home, the Dutch secret service said Monday.

“After Sept. 11, we found pages on the Internet calling on future jihadis to learn how to shoot in clubs near them, in their home country,” said Vincent van Steen, a spokesman for the AIVD.

Would-be fighters no longer need to travel to terrorist training camps abroad, the agency concluded in a report released Monday.

Instead, recruiters from Liberia and Mauritania -- “not the places we would have thought,” said Van Steen -- approach youngsters, especially the children of immigrants.

“These youngsters are in an identity crisis. They don’t know where they belong,” he said.

Some recruiters finance their work by selling drugs and fake passports, the report said. Others try to obtain positions of authority in mosques, which fund their efforts. German investigators established a similar pattern in the behavior of the Hamburg group connected with the Sept. 11 suicide pilots.

Such recruiting is not illegal in the Netherlands.