Popular among Islamists from the Anglo-world on Twitter, Ahmad Bashir, or better known under his provocative twitter name @dimashqee, has grown to a real intellectual star attracting attention from various journalists & academics alike online with his impeccable command over the English language & cherrypicked historical knowledge. Lesser known about him is his past within the Islamist movement, a part of his life which he has been trying to erase without much success. As he and his minions constantly kept reporting the twitter accounts I created that showed what kind of a disgusting manipulative rat he actually is, I created this blog in order to reveal his actual face behind his pseudo-intellectual mask & kosher English.
According to his own story, he is of Syrian-Arab descent and was born in Damascus, hence explaining his nickname Dimashqee, not paying enough attention in school back when he was little is also his reason why he argued that his Arabic isn't as good as that one of a fluent speaker. I couldn't confirm whether this story is true or false but you won't be surprised to see people claiming that he is actually of Pakistani descent. Not seeing any reason why he would lie about his ethnic heritage, let's assume that his story is true and explains his lack of Arabic. He and his family later moved to the UK, to Coventry to be more precise where he quickly became close to ISIS around the age of 15-16.
To give you some ideas of the tweets he posted (some Twitter veterans might know him from his previous accounts: buruan8 / ghazishami / ghazi_dimashqi and eventually dimashqee) Please bear in mind that while he occasionally has posted regret and blamed his history on being ignorant (things he quickly deleted afterward) that his tweets from his past show no clue of any ignorance at all, he was fully aware of the crimes committed by ISIS and openly endorsed them, including the execution of a boy for breaking his fast and offering cookies to his friends. The only thing that changed is the language he uses, which he these days wraps in a philosophical jacket in order to seem more cultured, you'll read later in this article what led to his split with ISIS.
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| Note Dimashqee's manipulation |
According to one theory, I've heard from his side, he became disillusioned with the way ISIS was behaving as a state without giving many details. Whatever his issue was with ISIS, knowing that he actively supported their crimes you'd hardly be convinced that it had to do with their executions and the repression that they brought. The other theory, which sounds more likely to me, is that he grew out to be the biggest English-twitter supporter of ISIS, when Western governments together with social media sites started cracking down on them ISIS instructed its members to join the fight on the ground, which, while bragging about how "fierce" the British volunteers were & advising girls to join the caliphate, he refused to do so leading to his excommunication from the group. Add to that the fact that his friend Shamiwitness got caught in Hawai while too advising people to go to the caliphate he realized that his links with ISIS would cost him dearly, acting like a true opportunist & explaining why he suddenly became more critical of the group: out of fear for reprisal, if he had any dignity, he'd be open about his former IS-links and face justice for it.
Regarding his friend & him (while he doesn't get mentioned by name):
https://news.vice.com/article/unmasking-of-shamiwitness-offers-glimpse-into-the-bizarre-world-of-islamic-state-twitter-fanboys
Ghazishami is a curious case. A teenage schoolboy in the UK, with notably lax internet security — he used to use a selfie of his own weakly-bearded face as his profile pic, and linked openly to Instagram and Ask.fm accounts that showed him in school uniform, threatening to behead his teachers — he would nevertheless enthusiastically encourage the murder of captive Western journalists, Shias, Kurds, and Alawites using various handles and accounts.
Whereas ShamiWitness for the most part cautiously avoided breaching hate speech laws, Ghazishami flagrantly abused them. Eventually, Ghazishami won the enmity of actual Islamic State fighters for assuming a dominant role in pro-IS Twitter while frequently making excuses for never actually joining them.
On one level, this is just a spat between teenage boys on the internet, though with the added distinction that some of the teenagers in question are armed militants in the Middle East and others are besotted fanboys who had drunken so deeply from the Islamic State Kool-Aid that their trolling got them on the radar of the security services.
In the case of ShamiWitness, it is unclear whether or not he actually broke any laws, and therefore whether his unveiling as a beardless Twitter cheerleader is merely an embarrassment to him rather than a public service to humanity. Indeed, the disruption of these accounts might possibly have inadvertently made the process of tracking jihadists more difficult.
Here are some tweets regarding that era that in my opinion strengthen the second theory:
Yet that didn't stop him from advising ignorant or naive people to still join ISIS.
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