(European Conservative) Seven fitness influencers were arrested in Spain on January 20th, suspected of jihadist indoctrination. The arrests, the result of a months-long investigation, took place in several Spanish cities, although the operations are not all connected. At least one of those arrested had more than 100,000 followers on platforms such as Instagram and YouTube where, for years, he had been teaching self-defence, fitness training, and calisthenics routines. Recently, he had begun to use his huge network to intersperse videos with exclusively religious, anti-Western, and proselytising themes.
The arrested fitness influencers all had in common that they used nasheeds (Islamic hymns) to accompany their training routines. According to the Spanish police, these were hymns with a significant power of indoctrination, many of them having been created by the Islamic State’s multimedia machinery.
Music platforms like SoundCloud or YouTube have hundreds of playlists of nasheeds for fitness routines.
