ISIS Affiliated Group Calls For Assassination Of Twitter Employees

A Twitter account associated with ISIS issued a direct call, Monday, for attacks on Twitter employees in San Francisco. 

The disturbing tweets were apparently in retaliation to Twitter’s policy of suspending ISIS and ISIS -sympathizing Twitter accounts which use the social media platform to post gory videos of executions and recruit new members.

According to Vocativ, in an exclusive report on the story, the account, @dawlamoon (now suspended) is linked to Al Nusra Al Maqdisia, a group that has reportedly pledged allegiance to ISIS. 

Twitter has been engaged in a prolonged game of whack-a-mole with ISIS, closing its accounts and those of similar organizations as they come to prominence, in an attempt to stifle their extremist propaganda and exhortations to violence. ISIS and other groups have consistently thwarted these efforts, now they’re going one step further, urging “lone wolf” actors to target Twitter employees.

The tweets, written in Arabic, and translated into English, were accompanied by a hashtag that translated to “the concept of lone wolf attacks.”

“#The_Concept_of_Lone_Wolf_Attacks The time has arrived to respond to Twitter’s management by directly attacking their employees and physically assassinating them!! Those who will carry this out are the sleepers cells of death.”

“#The_Concept_of_Lone_Wolf_Attacks Twitter management should know that if they do not stop their campaign in the virtual world, we will the bring the war to them in the real world on the ground.”

“#The_Concept_of_Lone_Wolf_Attacks Every Twitter employee in San Francisco in the United States should bear in mind and watch over himself because on his doorstep there might be a lone wolf assassin waiting.”

Vocativ goes on to report that the now suspended account published mostly official ISIS materials, “as well as news and updates on the group’s activities in Iraq and Syria, including images from field operations.”

 Twitter had suspended it several times, and it had reopened with slight amendments to the username. The latest iteration had nearly 3,000 followers before it was suspended. An analysis of the account revealed that over 11 percent of its interactions over the past 30 days have been with American-based accounts. A handful of those followers claimed to be in the United States. Individual users were also identified in Canada, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Germany.

Twitter won’t say whether it is increasing security at its downtown San Francisco headquarters, according to SFGate, but its “security team is investigating the veracity of these threats with relevant law enforcement officials.”