Tweeting for ISIL?

It was quite a shock to see Channel 4 News on Thursday (11/12),   with ‏@ShamiWitness emblazoned across the  background.  I'd come across this userid myself on Twitter.  A look through the archive shows the odd retweet, but mainly tweets he was mentioned in.

Aymenn J. Al-Tamimi, writing on Joshua Landis's Syria Comment blog, has a detailed analysis:

he emerged on the Twitter scene around the beginning of 2013. At that time, he would often try to engage certain, more prominent Twitter users on issues related to the Islamic world, myself among them. For instance, one of his first tweets to me was to criticise a rather inane tweet I had written on a ‘Bangladesh Spring’ victory over Islamists.

His perspective was clearly that of an Islamist but- undoubtedly through prior tracking of social media- he seemed to have a broad knowledge of Syria’s Sunni insurgency with a particular focus on Salafi and jihadi groups, something that extended to Libya in particular and the wider Muslim world [..]. Other indications of his Islamist leanings in those earlier times were his support for the Ikhwan-led government in Egypt [i.e. the Morsi / Muslim Brotherhood government ] - his main line of defence being that none of the Ikhwan’s opponents could necessarily do a better job at governance (not an unreasonable argument)- and his cheering on of Erdogan during the Gezi Park protests that erupted in May 2013. It was of course during this same period (i.e. April 2013 onwards) that IS’ predecessor the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) emerged: at that early stage of ISIS’ existence it would not necessarily be fair to characterize him as an ISIS partisan. On the contrary he was more keen on the notion of ‘Islamic rebel/jihadi unity’, so to speak: something that could include ISIS. In short, his worldview was of an Islamist who at least had hope in the gradualist non-violent Islamisation projects of Erdogan and the Ikhwan in Egypt while showing sympathy for jihadis more generally. [..]

Two events mark key points in Shami’s transformation from an apparently rather standard Islamist to the IS fanboy as so many have come to know him. [..] The first event was the coup against the Ikhwan-led government, which enraged him considerably. Yet even after this point, he had not yet become a full-blown ISIS partisan, but rather was still willing to give credence to forces like Jabhat al-Nusra (Syria’s al-Qa’ida affiliate) and the Islamic Front coalition, which contrasts him with other prominent hardline ISIS fans at the time  [..]. Thus, the second main turning point was the outbreak of infighting between ISIS and rebel groups at the start of 2014. This completes his definite public transformation into the ISIS/IS fanboy. It is also this stage, it should be noted, where many of the other pro-jihadi Twitter users take more definite sides in contrast to a previous attempt at jihadi brotherology.

This is worth reading in full.

The Times,   on Saturday, described ShamiWitness as an "Isis spokesman" and got the timing slightly wrong: it says the unmasking was "last night";  in fact, the original story was run on C4N, Thursday (19:00),  with a followup on Friday (19:07).

Posted 16.12.2014

Update: 16.12.
Simon Israel's latest piece for C4N,  Sunday (14/12), can be found here.