Daesh Exposes American at Heart of Its Online Propaganda
Local Editor
The Wahhabi Daesh [Arabic acronym for "ISIS" / "ISIL"] had revealed the chief editor of its online propaganda magazine was an American computer scientist.
The group named the media operative as Sheikh Abu Sulayman ash Shami in the 8th edition of its online magazine Rumiyah, which was released early Thursday. It said he was killed in a coalition airstrike near Tabqa, Syria, just to the southwest of Raqqa, during the second week of January.
His picture and his biography have striking similarities with Ahmad Abousamra, a 35-year-old Syrian-American who grew up in the leafy Boston suburb of Stoughton, Massachusetts, and who was first placed on the FBI most wanted list in 2013 and made the subject of a $50,000 reward because of his connections to a Massachusetts terrorism investigation centering on his alleged close associate Tarek Mehanna, who was arrested in 2009 and convicted of terrorism-related charges in a Boston court in late 2011.
According to the indictment against him, Abousamra traveled to Pakistan in 2002 to try to get terrorist training so he could enter Afghanistan to fight and kill American soldiers. But he failed and returned to the US.
In 2003 Abousamra and Mehanna discussed the feasibility of killing a US executive branch official, a cooperating witness who was party to the conversation told the FBI.
Later in the year the trio discussed launching an attack on a US mall, inspired by the Washington sniper shootings, according to the witness, who began cooperating with the FBI in 2006. The informant said they backed out of the plan after failing to get hold of automatic weapons.
The details in the Daesh eulogy correlate almost exactly with the FBI indictment.
According to CNN, a law enforcement official said that US investigators were looking at the possibility that Abousamra, still on the run, was involved in Daesh's online propaganda efforts.
Daesh had now revealed the man it identifies by the name Abu Sulayman was the driving force behind its international propaganda operation.
According to the Daesh account, Abu Sulayman joined militant extremist efforts early in the Syrian war, where he joined the group Jabhat al Nusra, which had been dispatched by Daesh leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi to build up operations in the country.
When that group became split in 2013 between factions loyal to Baghdadi and al-Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri, Abu Sulayman maintained his allegiance to Baghdadi.
Based at that point in the Aleppo area, Abu Sulayman requested to participate in a suicide attack, according to Daesh account. But before he could carry one out, he was noticed by Sheikh Abu Muhammad al-Furqan, the head of Daesh's media operations, who brought him into the group's propaganda department.
The Daesh account suggests Abu Sulayman then worked in and around Raqqa, the location of the group's headquarters in Syria. When al-Furqan decided to launch a new online English language magazine, Dabiq, he selected Abu Sulayman as its chief editor, according to the Daesh account.
The first issue of Dabiq was published in July 2014 and proclaimed the emergence of the new "caliphate" Daesh had announced just weeks earlier.
"He would write many articles for the magazine, review what his fellow editors wrote, and scrutinize any materials that were translated for publishing, spending a great deal of time and effort doing so," the Daesh eulogy stated.
After starting Dabiq, Daesh launched several online magazines in other languages such as French and Turkish, repurposing content from Dabiq. In September 2016, as it became increasingly likely the group was going to lose control of Dabiq, it renamed its flagship online magazine Rumiyah, which it has since published monthly in multiple foreign languages. Abu Sulayman maintained his stewardship of the publication.
Source: CNN, Edited by website team
