ShamiWitness : How Bellingcat and neocons collaborated with most influential ISIS propagandist on Twitter | The Grayzone
▻https://thegrayzone.com/2018/10/29/shamiwitness-how-bellingcat-and-neocons-collaborated-with-the-most-infl
Vous souvenez-vous, au début de la « révolution syrienne » de l’extraordinairement courageuse « Girl of Damascus », en réalité un étudiant un peu espion quelque part à Edinbourg ? Ici, c’est un très influent compte Twitter, sous le nom de ShamiWitness, qui faisait la révolution depuis Bangalore, sans même parler l’arabe !
As it turned out, ShamiWitness was a fake “Syria expert”. The millennial yuppie who ran the @ShamiWitness account was as much an insider expert on ISIS as the western Syria hacks who boosted him.
It wasn’t the “experts” like Bellingcat who unmasked ShamiWitness — quite the opposite, Bellingcat’s team played a major role in building him up as a credible expert. Rather, it was a Channel 4 report exposing ShamiWitness as a fake — but a very dark and dangerous fake, with very real world consequences.
@ShamiWitness was run by a 24-year-old Indian marketing executive named Mehdi Masroor Biswas, who tweeted out ISIS and Syria “expertise” from his bachelor pad in Bangalore, India.
And just like that, the London and Washington Syria regime-change neocons who’d been boosting ShamiWitness suddenly looked like fools — as well as ISIS accessories. Contrary to what they had all assumed, ShamiWitness wasn’t the expert Syria insider he pretended to be. He spoke no Arabic; he was nowhere near Syria.