ISIS have really been going downhill lately, what with reports of them going broke and this helmet cam footage of some of their soldiers in the field portraying them as bumbling clowns. And now they’ve committed another major faux pas here when they attempted their first social media campaign in months.
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Over the weekend, ISIS supporters within Europe posted up photographs of pieces of paper on social media that had pro ISIS rhetoric written on them, ahead of a speech made by ISIS spokesperson Abu Mohammed al-Adnani. Obviously they thought this would strike fear into the hearts of everyone everywhere as it would show how widespread support for the organisation was, and although it may have succeeded in this quest at some level, thanks to the internet they also managed to reveal their exact locations to the world.
Because part of the campaign was to include some evidence of where they were i.e. in European locations, these were clearly seen in the photographs. Elliot Higgins – the owner of social media investigation website Bellingcat – decided to enlist the help of the internet to track them down. Numerous Twitter users pooled their resources, examining Google Street view, CCTV footage and looking for famous landmarks and eventually Elliot was able to tweet the exact locations of these four chumps:
ISIS Fanboy number 1 was geolocated to this spot in Germany h/t @hotzn1 & @ArtWendeley https://t.co/z3zrUzSZhp pic.twitter.com/3NZn6mPoMj
— Eliot Higgins (@EliotHiggins) May 21, 2016
ISIS Fanboy number 2 was geolocated to this spot in London h/t @mamzbondok https://t.co/NFsuoM8nhJ pic.twitter.com/GZoiWFhkas
— Eliot Higgins (@EliotHiggins) May 21, 2016
ISIS Fanboy number 3 was gelocated to this spot in Paris h/t @Naenil https://t.co/TnbFabFpnO pic.twitter.com/X9Qqc2lp6R
— Eliot Higgins (@EliotHiggins) May 21, 2016
ISIS Fanboy number 4 was geolocated to this spot in Holland https://t.co/6akdIySqjv pic.twitter.com/XK6q60hrDZ
— Eliot Higgins (@EliotHiggins) May 21, 2016
Looks like the local police won't have to go too far at all to investigate the Dutch #IS supporter pic.twitter.com/6CVITztao6
— Nathan Patin (@NathanPatin) May 22, 2016
Ooof. That extra tweet from Nick really rams home how stupid these guys have been with divulging their locations. There’s no news yet on if the authorities have followed up on any of this yet, but you would really hope that they would have by now.
Elliot explained how it all managed to happen so easily:
We crowd-sourced the answer on Twitter, so it was really a group effort. For London it was basically a local IDing the location, then for Holland several people noted the lamp posts were distinct enough to narrow down the locations, then it was just a matter of looking.
[In the] Paris photo the Suzuki sign was ID’d, then it was basically searching for Suzuki dealers in Paris and checking the locations on Google Street view.
If you want to know the truth about how ISIS was formed, check out our documentary on the subject below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnfr8N9LRoc
