The head of ISIS’ “cyber caliphate” has been killed in an airstrike, a Syrian monitoring group said.
Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, a grassroots ISIS opposition group that has reporters within the Islamic State, broke the news about Brit Junaid Hussain. ISIS accounts on Twitter have had mixed acknowledgment and denial of the Birmingham man’s death.
He tweeted under the name Abu Hussein Al Britani, and was behind the sharing of home addresses of U.S. military personnel.
According to Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently founding member Hamood Almossa, “Hussain was known to have high capability of changing his position and hide well, to escape the coalition air strikes.”
“He used to move very carefully with 4 cars, each going to a different place. He didn’t spend more than 6 hours in one place, and stayed underground,” Almossa wrote. “All this didn’t allow him to stay alive serving ISIS, because the coalition forces managed [Tuesday] to kill him after attacking a group of cars near Abu Al Haif gas station in the city of Raqqa.”
“According to our correspondent in the city ‘The air forces targeted a car near the gas station, which killed 3 people, one of them is a high profile’. They our source confirmed that the person who died is in fact Junaid Al Hussain, with two of his men, one of them is European.”
However, this doesn’t mean the Cyber Caliphate is dead. Hussain trained an electronic army to not only hack but to utilize social media and dark places on the web to recruit and communicate with jihadists around the globe.
The U.S. government is reportedly still working to confirm the report. State Department press secretary John Kirby told reporters yesterday he didn’t “have anything to speak to with respect to these rumors.”
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