A 39-year-old German convict and former rapper who appeared in an Islamic State propaganda video holding a severed head was designated by the State Department on Monday as a global terrorist, part of a crackdown on foreign members of the extremist group.
Denis Cuspert joined the Islamic State group — sometimes known as ISIS or ISIL — in 2012 and has appeared in “numerous videos on its behalf,” including one from November after a beheading, according to the State Department announcement of the designation.
The statement noted that the Berlin-born Cuspert had been convicted of unspecified crimes in his home country before popping up on the Syrian battlefield with the nom de guerre Abu Talha al Almani, meaning “Abu Talha the German.” Before his conversion to Islam, according to news reports, Cuspert was active in Berlin’s hip-hop scene, rapping under the stage name “Deso Dogg.”
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The State Department said Cuspert had sworn an oath to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, served as “a willing pitchman” for atrocities and was a recruiter with special emphasis on finding German speakers to add to the group.
“Cuspert is emblematic of the type of foreign recruit ISIL seeks for its ranks — individuals who have engaged in criminal activity in their home countries who then travel to Iraq and Syria to commit far worse crimes against the people of those countries,” the State Department announcement said.
A study last year by King’s College in London estimates that 3,000 foreigners from Western states are actively involved in ISIS, with 320 Germans among them, according to the Deutsche Welle news organization.
Cuspert already was on the United Nations’ terrorist blacklist, which includes an assets freeze, a travel ban and an arms embargo against him. The U.S. designation overlaps with many of those measures, prohibiting American citizens from doing business with him. Such designations are largely symbolic because the militants rarely have those kinds of links to the United States.