No one can quite believe how Islam Yaken, a wealthy and well-educated Egyptian—he studied at the French school Lycee la Liberte and earned a law degree from Ain Shams University—could turn into a jihadist?
Shocked users of social networks tried to contact Yaken to verify whether his account was real or of he was even Egyptian.
No one can quite believe how Islam Yaken, a wealthy and well-educated Egyptian—he studied at the French school Lycee la Liberte and earned a law degree from Ain Shams University—could turn into a jihadist?
Shocked users of social networks tried to contact Yaken to verify whether his account was real or of he was even Egyptian.
The metamorphosis of this cosmopolitan man, who used to live in the upscale suburb of Heliopolis (north of Cairo), into a promoter for the Caliphate State seems incomprehensible—just as bizarre as the current al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri, who was once a former bourgeois doctor who lived in the posh Maadi neighborhood.
Yet Zawahri was responsible for several operations before joining international terrorism. Yaken’s transition, however, seemed spontaneous.
Yaken sneaked into Syria and later into the so-called borders of the Caliphate State without interrupting his tweets, which makes the transformation process into a Jihadi appear simple or a mere journey documented by photos.
Tweeting jihad
Yaken tweeted that he cannot bear the sight of slaughtering a rabbit, but said that he enjoyed slaughtering a human being for his ‘infidelity’.
Yaken introduces violence in an atmosphere of a sectarian war as if life within the so-called Caliphate state is like a video game in 3D where violence and slaughter are means to achieve higher scores.
He uploads graphic photos of severed heads and has over 8,000 followers, which adds a much more complicated dimension to his cyber role which seems organizational rather than provocative or obsessive.
Tweeting and posting updates are the sole role of social media activists since numerous Jihadi accounts report the organization’s movements and developments. They have attracted thousands of Arabs and hundreds of Europeans to join the troops of the ‘Caliphate State’.
Doubting the Jihadi accounts seems pointless especially since it is solely narrated by Yaken and even the photos that are meant to raise controversy are not verifiable, as he is the only forthcoming source.
Yaken’s diaries about sectarian violence represent a hell to the new world, and reducing his ideologies to conspiracy theories are disparate attempts on the part of the deniers, to distance themselves from any responsibility.
