Senior female ISIS agent unmasked and traced to Seattle

Channel 4 News, April 28, 2015:

She’s one of the final people that would-be jihadis might speak to before crossing the border to join the Islamic State group in Syria. The woman that the world’s media claim is Dutch or British and in the group’s de facto capital of Raqqa, with considerable online and offline influence.

Flick through the group’s new online “travel guidebook” and her contact details are listed, alongside 17 other agents and middlemen. Recruits are told to get in touch with these people when they make it to Turkey and want a contact in ISIS to help them cross the border.

This is the mysterious but influential woman until now known only as

Her Twitter account was recently accessed from Seattle, though friends say she has moved away, and her exact location remains unclear.

“I’m actually lost for words”, one school friend who wished to stay anonymous told Channel 4 News. “The Rawdah you are referring to is a childhood friend.” She said that the

Those doing the radicalising deliberately hide who they are. But they are altering lives one by one, in the US, in Europe and in the Middle East. They are generating support for the Islamic State group with such success, leaving intelligence agencies and families scrambling to cope.

The Brookings Institute says that social media is used “to spread and legitimise IS’s ideology, activities, and objectives, and to recruit and acquire international support”.

The intelligence community says that the way ISIS uses social media and online presentations has also been a game changer for recruitment. And the FBI last week declared that the US has a terror recruiting problem, with 25 people detained this year, a surge compared to last year.

The

While Twitter has moved aggressively in recent months to shut down ISIS-linked accounts, Umm Waqqas shared multiple ISIS documents on emigration months before her account was finally suspended earlier this month.

Bring two flashlights. Expect to be robbed. And don’t take taxis that will rip you off.

This is advice offered within

the ISIS travel guide linked to by Umm Waqqas

; a practical guide to making ‘Hijrah’ (emigrating) to join the Islamic State group. She is herself referenced within its pages as a key ISIS contact – someone who can help you join the Islamic State group.

So it’s no surprise that she is regularly sent requests for help on Twitter from people eager to sign up. Not only does she share guides written by others, she also posts her personal advice on how to emigrate successfully; she states the importance of having someone to vouch for you, for instance.

She also uploaded screenshots of four pages of the official ISIS magazine, which explain the importance of Muslims joining the Caliphate, accompanied by the word “enjoy”.

The pages give advice to those considering emigrating to the Islamic State, on how to accomplish it and the spiritual justification for doing so. She says there are “swarms of families flocking to [Islamic State].”