Singapore’s Terrorism Threat Assessment 2025: Youth Radicalisation, Composite Extremism, and the Limits of Vigilance

Singapore’s terrorism threat level remains elevated. That is the central finding of the Internal Security Department’s latest Singapore Terrorism Threat Assessment Report, released on 10 September. The report documents eight cases handled under the Internal Security Act (ISA) since July 2025 — six of which involved individuals under the age of 21. The trend is not incidental. It reflects a structural shift in how radicalisation operates, who it targets, and how quickly it can take hold.

ISD identifies several reasons why Singapore remains an attractive target for terrorist elements despite the absence of specific intelligence pointing to an imminent attack. The country’s perceived alignment with Western nations, including the United States and Israel, its concentration of iconic landmarks, and its identity as a secular, multicultural society all factor into the calculus of extremist groups. The external threat environment compounds this: ongoing conflicts in the Middle East, particularly those involving Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its armed proxies — Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the newly emerged Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamiya (HAYI) — have amplified terrorism risks well beyond the immediate conflict zones.

One case illustrates the proximity of that threat. Iranian-Iraqi national Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood Al-Saadi, a key operative linked to Kata’ib Hizballah and HAYI, applied for visas to enter Singapore on three separate occasions in 2023 and 2024. He did not travel here, but ISD confirmed he had moved through Southeast Asia in recent years. Believed to have directed at least 20 HAYI-linked attacks or attempted attacks on US and Jewish interests across Europe and North America, he was arrested in Türkiye in May 2026 and subsequently charged in the United States for plotting attacks on a New York synagogue and Jewish centres in Los Angeles and Scottsdale, Arizona. ISD stated plainly: “Had he attempted to enter Singapore, he would have been denied entry” — though the department did not discount the possibility that his regional travel carried terrorism-related intent.

Why are more young people being radicalised, and how?

The most consequential finding in this year’s report is the acceleration of youth radicalisation. ISA cases involving individuals under 21 have nearly quadrupled over five years — from four cases between 2017 and 2021, to 15 cases from 2022 to the present. Since June 2024, four 14-year-olds have been issued ISA orders, making them the youngest ever to be dealt with under the Act. Three of the five Islamic State supporters identified in the past year were actively planning attacks in Singapore using simple, accessible weapons.

The mechanism driving this is not mysterious. Online platforms — including gaming environments — serve as primary vectors. Algorithmic recommendations surface extremist content to users who have shown even marginal interest in related material. Gaming platforms allow youths to simulate mass violence repeatedly, normalising attitudes toward it before any real-world intention forms. ISD’s language is deliberate: “Fantasies of violence rehearsed in virtual spaces may develop into intentions or plans to commit real-world violence.” The report treats this not as speculation but as an observed pattern.

Compounding the age dimension is the emergence of what ISD terms Composite Violent Extremism (CoVE) — colloquially labelled “salad bar” extremism. Rather than adhering to a single coherent ideology, individuals construct personalised belief systems drawn from multiple, sometimes contradictory, extremist traditions.

All three were under 21. The ideological incoherence is not a bug in these cases — it is the feature. CoVE does not require doctrinal consistency; it requires only a shared disposition toward violence and a grievance architecture flexible enough to absorb multiple inputs.

The report also maps several other extremist currents gaining traction in the region. Nihilistic Violent Extremism (NVE) — violence pursued for its own sake rather than in service of a political or religious goal — intersects with the True Crime Community, an online subculture that glorifies perpetrators of mass violence. A November 2025 incident in Jakarta, where a 17-year-old True Crime Community participant detonated four improvised explosive devices in his high school and injured at least 96, illustrated how this subculture can translate into operational violence. In June 2026, two youths aged 14 and 15 conducted an NVE-linked school shooting in Tacloban City, the Philippines, killing three and injuring 20. The regional pattern is consistent.

Far-right extremism has also undergone localisation. Historically associated with white-supremacist and ethnonationalist movements in Western contexts, online far-right communities have adapted their narratives to resonate in Asian settings — incorporating elements of “East Asian supremacy,” anti-Muslim prejudice, and antisemitism. The incel ideology, rooted in misogyny and grievance-based views on gender, feeds into this ecosystem and has appeared as a co-occurring element in multiple Singapore cases.

What does the state’s response look like, and is it sufficient?

ISD’s institutional posture is one of calibrated firmness. The department has consistently intervened before attacks materialise — a record it is careful not to present as guaranteed. Coordinating Minister for National Security K Shanmugam, speaking on 27 July, framed the asymmetry clearly: “ISD and MHA have got to get it right every single time. The would-be attacker needs to get it right only once.” The warning is not rhetorical. It reflects a genuine operational constraint that no security architecture fully resolves.

Public reporting remains central to ISD’s strategy. The department has repeatedly called on residents not to treat early warning signs as someone else’s problem. The logic is straightforward: self-radicalisation, by definition, often occurs without an organisational footprint that intelligence services can easily track. Community-level observation fills a gap that surveillance alone cannot.

The structural challenge is that the conditions enabling radicalisation — algorithmic amplification, ungoverned online spaces, the global circulation of extremist content — are not within Singapore’s unilateral control. The ISA provides the legal instrument for intervention once radicalisation is detected. What the report implicitly acknowledges, without resolving, is that the detection window is narrowing as individuals radicalise faster and younger. That compression is the real policy problem the next iteration of this assessment will need to address more directly.