Iraq Crisis: Jihadi Whistleblower Exposes Isis Secrets on Twitter

A Twitter account run by an Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) insider is revealing the terror faction's inner workings, offering an intriguing insight into the richest terror organisation in the world and its march through northern Iraq.

The Twitter account @wikibaghdady is vehemently anti-Isis, fuelling suspicions that the person, or people, running the feed may be former members of the terror group who have defected to rebel rivals such as the al-Nusra Front.

Because of @wikibaghdady's credible insider revelations about the group, it has amassed a following of more than 37,000 accounts.

Some of the predictions to have been made by the leaker which have proved correct include Isis' alliance with Saddam Hussein's former Baathist party who took up arms to join the insurgency against Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki last week.

"He" also revealed Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's real name Ibrahim Awwad Ibrahim Bou Badri bin Armoush, the fact that he was born in the town of Samarra and not Baghdad and the names of other leaders on Baghdadi Isis council.

Naqshbandi Alliance

One of the more interesting revelations is that Isis' lightning charge through Iraq may have been helped by a network of Sunni connections, specifically with renowned figure Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, the leader of Iraq's banned Baath party following Saddam Hussein's execution in 2007.

The @wikibaghdady account claimed last week that a "meeting between ISIS and Naqshbandi Army near al-Qayara area south of Mosul had taken place with representatives from Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri and Baghdadi."

Al-Douri was a commander in the Iraqi army during the US invasion. He has been in hiding since but reports are emanating that he has returned to head The Naqshbandi Army, a Sunni coalition based in Mosul.

Analyst Hassan Hassan translated @wikibaghady's assertion that the two groups have agreed to put the Naqshbandi in power of a ruling coalition in the event of an overthrow of al-Maliki's Shia administration.

He is cautious about such an alliance as Isis "considers that Baathists follow an un-Islamic ideology", suggesting that the relationship would not be able to rise to one of shared governance.

Reliability concerns

In other revelations, the account has detailed the murky world of Middle Eastern jihadism where a powerplay for control over the "Islamic emirate of Syria and Iraq" between Isis and rival rebel faction the al-Nusra Front has emerged.

"He" reveals intimate details of the struggle for control at the top of the Isis leadership between its Chechen and Saudi commanders, defections among its fighters and assassinations of key Isis members.

The jihadi whistleblower spoke of Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's fight to counter defections with measures such as taking "passports from all foreign jihadis to prevent them from fleeing."

Brian Fishman, a fellow at the New America Foundation who has tracked the group from its beginnings, told the Daily Beast that the account is "at minimum a keen observer of events in Syria".

However, anxieties remain about the reliability of some of the account's tweets with Hassan telling the Daily Beast that a number of the posts are "not wholly accurate" and "should be taken with a pinch of salt".

Despite concerns over the accuracy of @wikibaghdady's revelations, what is clear is that whoever is controlling the account has a grudge to bear against the group, which out of all the jihadi factions operating in the barren wastelands of northern Iraq and Syria, has achieved the most success in its aim to achieve an Islamic caliphate across the Syrian-Iraqi border.