Daniel Fischer was 16 when his parents lost him. In a matter of months, the boy in Conway, South Carolina, went from an unworldly gamer to a convert to an extreme version of Islam who judged everything through it. When he was not alone in his room or on his phone, he was lecturing his parents on the faith. ‘He would just start spewing all this stuff,’ his father, Andy Fischer, told CNN. When the Fischers’ younger son said Daniel was watching beheading videos, they took his phone and his PlayStation, marched him to church, and Andy removed the door to his room. Nothing worked. ‘He was completely brainwashed,’ his mother, Ana, said.
Two weeks after they confiscated his electronics, the FBI and state police came to the door. Ana thought they had come to help. They had not. According to police records, agents had already taken Daniel into custody at school and were there to search the house. In his room they found two phones, two weapons, a laptop and a journal laying out his plans to join the Islamic State and his desire to ‘kill anyone who dares harm a single muslim life.’
His arrest warrant described a five-month span in which he pledged allegiance to ISIS, talked with other supporters about attacks, threatened violence at school and gathered ‘extensive Islamic extremist content,’ including bomb-making instructions. He was charged in state court with possessing a weapon of mass destruction for an act of terrorism and with conspiring to make a bomb threat. He pleaded guilty to one conspiracy charge tied to the threats, and in June, weeks before his 19th birthday, he was sentenced to three years in prison and five years of probation.
‘I realized I was having an identity crisis, and I found myself speaking to the wrong people,’ Daniel told the court at sentencing, the Post and Courier reported.
His case is one of many. Since 2024, a majority of the 19 ISIS-inspired plots and attacks in America involved at least one teenage suspect, according to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a nonprofit research group. The FBI made more than 700 counterterrorism arrests and disrupted roughly 640 planned attacks in 2025, but it runs into limits with juveniles. ‘The ages of those turning to extremism are getting younger every year, challenging our investigative methods, and complicating the ability for prosecutors to bring federal charges,’ FBI Deputy Director Christopher Raia told CNN in a statement, adding that extremist messaging ‘may offer explanations for and solutions to personal issues’ that juveniles use to justify violence.
‘The timeline for juveniles to act and carry out an attack is often faster – flash to bang,’ Raia said. Speed is the whole of it: Daniel went from bullied student to ISIS sympathizer to prisoner inside two years.
The calendar of recent cases is crowded. In April, federal prosecutors say, 19-year-old Ibrahim Kayumi and 18-year-old Emir Balat drove from the Philadelphia suburbs toward an anti-Islam demonstration outside the New York mayor’s home, talking of homemade bombs that could kill up to 60 people. ‘All I know is I want to start terror, bro,’ prosecutors allege Kayumi told Balat. Balat, a high school senior, threw two bombs; neither went off, and both teens were arrested on the spot. Asked why, Kayumi answered ‘ISIS’ from the back of a police vehicle, the indictment says, and Balat later wrote out a pledge of allegiance to the group. Both have pleaded not guilty to federal terrorism, conspiracy and weapons charges.
Two weeks ago federal authorities arrested another young Pennsylvanian, Jonathan Kramer, 21, for allegedly planning a mass shooting for ISIS. Court records show he faces a terrorism-related gun charge months after release from a counseling facility, where he had been held after an earlier mass-shooting plot as a minor. He has not yet entered a plea, his attorney told CNN.
The caliphate fell in 2019, but the brand did not. The upturn in ISIS-inspired activity followed the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023 and includes the 2025 New Year’s Day attack in New Orleans that killed 15 people. Young men arrested in Michigan over an ISIS-inspired Halloween plot made cryptic reference to the 2015 Paris attacks that killed 132. When officers asked Balat whether he had meant to match the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, he answered, ‘No, even bigger. It was only three deaths.’
Recruitment no longer works the old way. ‘This isn’t as simple as there is an entity called ISIS that’s operating overseas that’s reaching into our homeland, recruiting and radicalizing people,’ NYPD Deputy Commissioner Rebecca Weiner told CNN. ‘People are finding each other online, doing that mutually reinforcing self-radicalization... So it’s much more muddy, but it is also much more dangerous than a simple model that we’ve dealt with before.’ The Institute for Strategic Dialogue calls it a ‘digital ecosystem’ that can reach anyone anywhere, from American suburbs to sub-Saharan Africa.
The recruits share a shape. ISIS works at disenfranchised young men who are online and enraged, said John Horgan, a terrorist-psychology expert at Georgia State University. They ‘feel angry at the injustice and they come to the view that someone has to do something. And that something is violence because violence is the only language the enemy understands.’
Some families fight back through programs like Parents for Peace, a nonprofit that specialises in de-radicalisation. For more than a year Daniel has worked from prison with Mubin Shaikh, a former jihadist turned counterterrorism operative turned counselor. ISIS gave the boy ‘that purpose, that meaning, that belonging and that identity,’ Shaikh said, built on ‘striking back at the society that is making (him) feel this malaise.’
Ana Fischer wants her son’s case to stand as ‘a national warning.’ The warning is simple enough: the boys are getting younger, the feed is always on, and by the time the police come to the door it is already late.