A Twitter account with over 8,000 followers actively engaged in recruiting new people for the Islamic State group and transporting them to Syria may have been operated by a twenty-something girl from Seattle, Channel 4 reported.
The British news network investigated the @_UmmWaqqas account, which had been promoting the cause of the Islamic State (ISIS) until it was shut down on April 17. The woman behind the account is believed to be European.
Some early posts not related to IS or radical Islamism tweeted by @_UmmWaqqas indicated a passion for the Denver Broncos football team and take-out pizzas.
Channel 4 says it briefly contacted @_UmmWaqqas in March while working on the story and that the account was accessed from an IP address located in Seattle. But it couldn’t verify that Rawdah was actually writing, considering that several people may have access to the popular account. Her friends said she was no longer living in Seattle and named Saudi Arabia’s Medina or Denver, Colorado, as her possible whereabouts.
In an IS ‘travel guide’ for potential IS recruits who travel to Turkey to cross the border to Syria @_UmmWaqqas is listed as one of primary contacts, the report said.
In addition to advocating traveling to Syria and Iraq and joining the Islamic State, the account justified atrocities committed by the group, such as the execution by burning of a captured Jordanian pilot, saying it was ‘an eye for an eye’ retribution.
A white Australian doctor also appeared in an Islamic State propaganda video calling on medical “brothers and sisters” from around the world to come to Syria to join the “Jihad for Islam” against the West.
“My name is Abu Yusuf. I’m one of the medical team here. I came from Australia to the Islamic State to live under the khalifah,” the blue-eyed man with a distinctive Australian accent states in the YouTube video, which comes complete with a logo for the ‘Islamic State Health Service’.
He says he’s a doctor who traveled to Islamic State’s de facto capital of Raqqa, about 160km east of Aleppo, to offer his medical services.
According to news.com.au, the young doctor has been identified as former Adelaide University student Tareq Kamleh, believed to be in his late 20s, who completed his medical studies and later moved to Perth.
Australian Medical Association (AMA) Vice-President Stephen Parnis said the most influential membership organization representing registered medical practitioners and medical students of Australia has been outraged by ‘Abu Yusuf’s’ video.