The flood of Islamist chatter on social media is making it hard for intelligence officials sifting through the ravings to distinguish between braggarts and genuine threats,
The New York Times reported.
Elton Simpson, one of the perpetrators of the Sunday attack on the Draw the Prophet cartoon contest in Garland, Texas, had been active on Twitter using the moniker Shariah is Light:
"When will they ever learn. They are planning on selecting the best picture drawn of Rasulullah (saws) in Texas." The phrase Rasulullah (saws) is a reverential way of referring to the founder of Islam.
Simpson's tweet was a response to one by Mohamed Abdullahi Hassan, a Somali-American now in Somalia and a promoter of the Islamic State (ISIS), who had posted:
"The brothers from the Charlie Hebdo attack did their part. It's time for brothers in the #US to do their part," the Times reported.
A police official told the Times that ISIS functionaries were "talking to these wannabes on Twitter all day long. It's like the devil is sitting on their shoulder saying, 'Come on, they're insulting the prophet, what are you going to do about it?'"
Another official said, "There are so many like him that you have to prioritize your investigations," the Times reported.
Simpson had been on the FBI's watch list for being a member of Somalia-based al-Shabab. He had lately been posting about the Islamic State group on Twitter. Minutes before the Garland attack, he
tweeted "may Allah accept us as mujahideen" using #texasattack as a hashtag, according to the
BBC.
He also declared that he and Nadir Hamid Soofi, his accomplice in the Texas attack, had pledged allegiance to the "Leader of the Faithful," presumably Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the ISIS chief,
The Long War Journal reported.
ISIS took retroactive credit for the attack referring to Simpson, an African-American convert to Islam, and Soofi as "soldiers of the caliphate."
Al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri has also lately been inciting followers in the West to attack those who insult Muslim sensibilities, The Long War Journal reported.
Soofi, who was not being tracked by authorities, was the son of a Pakistani father and American-born mother, and was raised in Islamabad. He reportedly became vociferous recently on social media, though never explicitly threatening, according to the BBC.
"ISIS and its caliphate is becoming a brand, looser even than a network like al-Qaida. It's a kind of spiritual belonging. Claiming credit does not necessarily indicate any kind of organizational link," Omer Taspinar, a scholar of political Islam at the Brookings Institution, told the Times.
There are maybe hundreds of ISIS supporters in the United States active online.
Experts told the Times that it is not feasible to physically watch all of them or even observe their online behavior. It takes a team of up to 25 people working in shifts to keep one suspect under surveillance 24/7.
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