American terrorist fugitive Ahmad Abousamra, who is believed to be running the Islamic State’s sophisticated propaganda machine, has a paltry $50,000 bounty on his head. Why?
Abousamra was added to the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list in 2013 after US intelligence fingered the onetime Boston prep schooler as the head of Western recruiting for ISIS.
Since then, officials believe more than 180 young Americans have joined ISIS. That doesn’t include the roughly two dozen who have been caught trying.
Others have plotted or carried out terrorist attacks on American soil in the name of ISIS.
According to criminal complaints, virtually all of the suspects were radicalized by the graphic videos of beheadings, cage burnings, bombings and other horrors produced by Abousamra in English and posted online from a safe house somewhere in Aleppo, Syria.
He and his terrorist pals called them “jihadeos” when they first started making them from the bedrooms of their parents’ homes in the Boston area last decade.
Last month, authorities in New Jersey say they found nearly 200 of these jihadeos, including ISIS executions, on the laptop of a US Air Force veteran who was indicted for trying to join ISIS in Syria.
With several more American Muslim youths arrested this month trying to join ISIS, counterterrorism officials have become increasingly concerned they are losing the propaganda war to the brutal terror group.
Terrorist groups like al Qaeda and ISIL deliberately target their propaganda in the hopes of reaching and brainwashing young Muslims.
- President Barack Obama
“We have a terror recruitment problem,” an exasperated US Attorney Andrew Luger said at a press conference in Minneapolis, where another six young American Muslim men were lured into joining ISIS’s ranks before authorities intercepted them at airports.
Even the White House concedes ISIS’s well-oiled propaganda machine, which includes Twitter hashtag campaigns, is effective at spreading its message.
So, why isn’t it doing more to shut it down?
Taking out Abousamra and his computers would seem the quickest way. Yet the FBI’s reward for information leading to his capture and return to the US is puny compared with what the bureau is asking for other terrorists who arguably aren’t nearly as actively dangerous as the 33-year-old Abousamra.
In fact, at just $50,000, the bounty on his head is the smallest of any of the 30 terrorists on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list. The others on the list are worth an average $5 million each to the government.
The reward for Abousamra’s al Qaeda counterpart, American propagandist and Western recruiter Adam Gadahn, is $1 million, even though Gadahn stopped putting out his English-language hate messages years ago.
Abousamra, on the other hand, is thought to be churning out highly polished productions at a steady clip. Most recently, ISIS released a video of its fighters executing a string of Christians on a Libyan beach.
The videos have caught the eye of Hollywood filmmakers, who are impressed with their quality. They say they are not only well-edited but show elements of modern cinematic techniques.
Earlier this month, ISIS released an 11-minute video called “We Will Burn America” in which it threatened another 9/11, an attack the FBI says inspired Abousamra.
View videoSo far this year, ISIS, through its media organs al-Furqan and al-Hayat, has posted more than 250 slickly produced graphic messages online. These messages are widely disseminated through Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.
Abousamra, who has a computer technology degree and once worked for a telecom company, is also thought to edit “Dabiq,” the Islamic State’s webzine.
“We have to be honest with ourselves. Terrorist groups like al Qaeda and ISIL deliberately target their propaganda in the hopes of reaching and brainwashing young Muslims,” President Obama said at February’s “Summit on Countering Violent Extremism.” “That’s the truth. The high-quality videos, the online magazines, the use of social media, terrorist Twitter accounts — it’s all designed to target today’s young people online, in cyberspace.”
Obama says the best way to blunt such propaganda is through counter-messaging. In short, tweeting. The State Department is spending money to put out positive messages about America on social media.
Hashtags aren’t going to stop the jihadeos. Taking out Ahmad Abousamra would.
Paul Sperry is a Hoover Institution media fellow and author of “Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversive Have Penetrated Washington.”