ISIS has been posted all over the media in the past couple of months. The jihadi extremist terrorist group has now started recruiting United States citizens to join the group in order to help them infiltrate the United States from the inside out. If you are a loyal American, it seems like a no-brainer that you will not join the group ISIS, but already, official estimates suggest that more than 100 Americans have joined foreign militant forces.

People from all over the world are joining ISIS. The jihadi group attracts around five people from the United Kingdom each week. Total, foreign fighters have been successfully recruited upwards of 2,500 western members.

Many of the members appear to be young adults and teenagers. What seems to be drawing in young people to join a terrorist group against the country they were born into? Perhaps a sense of belonging. ISIS has become an expert in making the group look appealing to young people through videos and social media. They are giving young people the chance to feel like they are important, and making them feel like they are a possible solution to other corrupt governments.

Three girls from Colorado recently skipped school and set up fights to get themselves to Syria and join ISIS. It was suggested that the girls had help from ISIS through the internet because the flights that the girls had set up did not set off any trip wires that the FBI would normally have set to track flight patterns in the area to try to keep these types of issues from happening.

The girls who were being recruited by ISIS, though Americans, were of Sudanese and Somali descent. Americans joining anti-American groups is a trend that has been seen during periods such as World War II, when some American citizens defected to Nazi Germany and fought for Axis powers.

While the recruitment numbers for Americans interested in joining foreign fighting organizations are low, it is in no way a number that should be ignored.

American security experts and government officials have stated that ISIS and other militant groups pose no immediate threat to American citizens on U.S. soil. Richard Barrett, senior vice president of the Soufan Group — an intelligence agency based in New York — says threats are not currently valid due to the priorities of the ISIS command structure.

ISIS leaders believe they must “cleanse the area where the Muslim majority states are, and then having done that, you can go out and beat up the rest of the world,” says Barrett.

The American defectors joining ISIS must realize that in doing so, they have most likely embarked on a one-way trip. The United States has one of the strongest central intelligence agencies in the world, so the thought of someone believing that they can join a terrorist group that is noted as being clearly anti-American and not be tracked in any form by the U.S. government, is a ridiculous idea.

These relatively few individuals must have been cognizant of these factors when they departed, but the ever increasing number of volunteers to the ISIS cause suggests that these consequences have not done enough to deter U.S. citizens.