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Old March 24th, 2015 #1
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Post ISIS "hacking division" releases hit list of 100 U.S. military personnel



In a dramatic propaganda move, Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham terrorists have published a hit list of 100 American military personnel, including names, photos and addresses they claimed to have hacked from secure government computers.

“O Kuffar [infidels] in America, O You who worship the cross, O You crusaders that fight the Islamic State, we say to you: “DIE IN YOUR RAGE!” reads a message from the terrorist group, also known as ISIS.

Signed by the “Islamic State Hacking Division,” it urges supporters in the West to launch lone-wolf attacks, such as the one last year on Parliament Hill in Ottawa by Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, which killed Corporal Nathan Cirillo.

“We have made it easy for you by giving you addresses, all you need to do is take the final step, so what are you waiting for?” the message reads. “Kill them in their own lands, behead them in their own homes, stab them to death as they walk their streets thinking that they are safe.”

We have made it easy for you by giving you addresses, all you need to do is take the final step, so what are you waiting for?

Cpl. Cirillo’s murder last year followed an attack in Quebec in which a soldier in uniform was run over near a military base, and another in London in which a British solider was beheaded on the street. Those attacks are thought to have been opportunistic, targeting soldiers in public by their uniforms, but the publication of personal information on specific targets in advance has added a new and terrifying dimension to the threat of lone-wolf terrorism in countries fighting ISIS.

The named soldiers are reportedly being notified in person.

There was some doubt about whether this was an actual hack of secure computers, or whether this information was freely available on the Internet and simply compiled by ISIS propagandists. Some of the targeted military personnel had been mentioned in news reports about air strikes on ISIS targets.

Most are men but there were some women, whose faces have been blurred.

A U.S. Defence Department official told The New York Times that the list includes bomber crews based in Louisiana and North Dakota that are not part of the ISIS mission.

Although the “Islamic State Hacking Division” appears to be a novel designation, this is not the first time U.S. military computer systems have been compromised by ISIS.

Earlier this year, hackers calling themselves CyberCaliphate gained control of the Twitter account of U.S. Central Command, posting jihadist images and similarly threatening attacks on personnel, though not by name.

It posted eight messages, including images that purported to detail military strategies and claims that ISIS had infiltrated all military computers, before the account was suspended after about half an hour.

A White House spokesman played down the seriousness of that attack, saying there is “a pretty significant difference between a large data breach and the hacking of a Twitter account.”

But the symbolic impact was typical of ISIS, which in addition to its robust ground campaign in Syria and Iraq has also waged a dramatic propaganda war against the West, including elaborately staged ransom videos of hostages.

Based in part on this impulse toward propaganda, the British author and Nobel laureate VS Naipaul this weekend published a rousing encouragement for countries to join together in pursuit of the “military annihilation” of ISIS.

Calling it the most potent threat since Hitler’s Germany, he wrote that ISIS threatens a “contemporary holocaust” and “could very credibly abandon the label of Caliphate and call itself the Fourth Reich.”

Like the Nazis, he writes, ISIS adherents are anti-Semitic, racist and anti-democratic. “There is even the same self-regarding love of symbolism, presentation and propaganda.”

News of the threats comes as the fragile Arabian state of Yemen recovers from a series of suicide bomb attacks against Shiite mosques by terrorists claiming allegiance to ISIS, and the government of the North African nation of Tunisia revealed that one suspect remains at large after an ISIS-inspired terrorist attack on a museum in the capital Tunis.

It also follows news that suggests the ISIS propaganda campaign has been successful in recruiting more than just fighters to its strongholds in northern Syria.

Nine British medical students, five men and four women, reportedly crossed from Turkey into ISIS-held Syrian territory this weekend, claiming to have gone there to work as medics.

They are believed to be in the border town of Tel Abyad. All were raised in England, but had been working until recently at a medical school in Sudan.

Mehmet Ali Ediboglu, a Turkish politician assisting the families of the students, said they “have been cheated, brainwashed.”

One of them, Lena Maumoon Abdulqadir, 19, wrote in a message to her family: “Don’t worry about us, we’ve reached Turkey and are on our way to volunteer helping wounded Syrian people.”

National Post

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