Someone Is Spilling ISIS’s Secrets on Twitter

This is a long but interesting piece, so read on here.

The Daily Beast, by George Siegel

The terror group may be on a rampage in Iraq. But ISIS is being threatened from inside, it seems. And no one is sure who’s behind the tweets disclosing the group’s intimate details.

A mysterious Twitter account is trying to stop ISIS’s rise to power by spilling the terror group’s secrets online. For more than six months a series of tweets have detailed the alleged covert alliances and conspiratorial machinations behind the ascension of The Islamic State of Iraq and the Sham, the Islamist group taking over large parts of Iraq. Taken together, the tweets form a slanted but valuable picture of ISIS and one of the only portraits of its leaders. Perhaps even more important, the account is still active, sending out tweets days ago about ISIS’s current strategy in Iraq and what it plans to do next.

Sitting over a keyboard somewhere, likely in a Syrian town now held by rebel forces, is @wikibaghdady, the leaker behind the anti-ISIS account. He may be a former ISIS member who defected to ISIS’s rivals in Syria, the al Qaeda-backed Al Nusra front, as some analysts have speculated. Or, “he” may actually be more than one person, with @wikibaghdady serving as the avatar for a group effort to undermine ISIS’s official story and knock it from its perch atop the jihadist movement. Whatever the case, @wikibaghdady has put ISIS in uncomfortable positions, revealing the true name of the group’s leader and a deeply controversial association.

The online gang fight goes back to Syria and the competition between jihadist groups there for turf, religious authority, and the spoils of war. So does the @wikibaghdady account; it too grew out of the fighting in Syria as a reaction to ISIS’s maximalist approach and the bloody in-fighting between Islamist factions there.