A wealthy American college graduate is suspected to be the mastermind of an unprecedented propaganda blitz by Islamic State terror group, US authorities have said.
Ahmad Abousamra, 32, a dual American-Syrian citizen with a distinguished academic career, is thought to be the architect of the Islamic State (Isis) media campaign, which has included the sophisticated use of social media and a stream of professional-quality videos.
In parallel with its battlefield onslaught, Isis has proved itself adept in exploiting the freedoms of the internet and social media. Isis has used Hollywood-style editing and special effects to produce recruitment videos aimed at young Muslim men in the West — often using foreign fighters to extol the supposed virtues of the group.
Its social media strategy has included sophisticated Twitter hashtag campaigns and an Isis app, called “Dawn of Glad Tidings”, which automatically regurgitates its propaganda.
The app, which was eventually taken down by Google, allowed it to post tens of thousands of tweets per day. The terror group’s online presence has enabled it to magnify the perception of its power and presence in Iraq and Syria.
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Individual Isis terrorists have also been encouraged to pump out their own propaganda online, though Isis recently issued an edict banning the publication of photographs of beheadings that were not authorised by its central command.
“They have far surpassed any jihadist organisation anywhere in the world in their ability to run a very sophisticated media operation in multiple languages and high-quality video,” said Charles Lister, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution in Doha.
“The slick nature of the videos — for all their brutal content — has attracted unprecedented numbers of foreign fighters. An awful lot of that is down to media strategy and content and as such he would be worthy of identification as an extremely important figure in the organisation.”
The FBI has issued a $50,000 reward for information leading to Abousamra’s capture. He was born in France in 1981 and grew up in an exclusive Boston suburb, the son of a eminent endocrinologist at Massachusetts general hospital. He attended a private school, Xaverian Brothers in Westwood, before transferring to Stoughton High where he made the honour roll of the school.
At Northeastern University, where he studied computer science, he made “The Dean’s List” for academic excellence. In 2004 he travelled to Iraq to fight US forces and was later alleged to have been involved in the media operations of al-Qaeda in Iraq with Tarek Mehanna and another unidentified man.
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Mehanna was arrested and imprisoned after the two men returned to the US in 2006. Abousamra was questioned by the FBI but subsequently fled to Syria. He was charged with terrorism offences in 2009 and placed on the FBI’s most wanted terrorists list in 2013.
US officials told ABC News that they believed Abousamra was running Isis’s Al-Hayat media arm. Abousamra, the FBI said, has a “college degree related to computer technology and was previously employed at a telecommunications company”.