In his former life, Abu Rafiq, a short, stocky 35-year-old who was born and raised in Damascus, ran a successful business selling groceries across Syria. Now he heads to work each day equipped with a camera phone. He walks the streets of Raqqa, the Syrian city that has become the self-styled capital of Islamic State of the Levant (ISIL) taking clandestine photographs and videos of anything that exposes the terrorists’ lies: bombed-out buildings, empty food stalls, homeless families. He then uploads the images to Twitter.
The clicks of a camera phone in the Levant may seemingly have little to do with what David Cameron this week called “the struggle of our generation” in his speech on Britain’s new counter-extremism strategy, but Abu Rafiq is working on its front line. Raqqa is the heart of an ISIL propaganda machine so vast and sophisticated it can seep into vulnerable young minds thousands of miles away. Some 5,000 European jihadists have fallen for its message, at least 700 of whom are British. In the past three years, the Metropolitan Police has removed nearly 60,000 pieces of terrorist online content.
Rafiq and his men have been operating since the turn of the year. They aim to disrupt conversations between would-be jihadists and the so-called caliphate they profess to join. It is dangerous work — some activists have already been captured by the terrorists. Earlier this week, according to the monitoring group the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, ISIL shut down private Wi-Fi access across Raqqa, forcing people into public internet cafes, where they can be better monitored.
The post ‘They are everywhere, watching everything': Syrian man works to expose ISIL’s social media lies appeared first on Trunews:.
from Trunews: http://ift.tt/1OJo4iK
via IFTTT
No comments:
Post a Comment