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The Daily Beast Analysis

Decent Essays

Some nights she was busy searching for baking recipes, on others she was downloading Pirates of the Caribbean, and every so often it was scores from the Ajax soccer team in the Netherlands she was checking. Such a digital footprint might be that of any young Belgian, but with one glaring difference: The woman to whom this digital record belongs was until recently a resident in Raqqa, and part of the so-called Islamic State. This is how American Website The Daily Beast started a long story talking about the hard disk of one of the Islamic State women’s laptops, reflecting the mindset of one European jihadist, and her finals days in the crumbling caliphate. The hard drive originally was taken by Ahrar al-Furat, a clandestine resistance group …show more content…

Instead, in the weeks leading up to her capture at the end of the summer, she frequently visits the Flemish language Wikipedia page for the war in Afghanistan and repeatedly watches YouTube videos of American AC 130 gunships battering suspected Taliban positions in Afghanistan. They almost serve as an attempt to re-confirm her radicalization, and re-justify her beliefs. The hard drive is loaded with more than a terabyte of pornography, there are regular visits to the pornographic site too. But despite watching these movies, she was also interested in listening to Jihadi scholars connected to Islamic State and Qaeda. She appears to remain in contact with Islamists back home in Belgium, unaffected by Facebook’s efforts to close down accounts used by the group, and exchanging messages with friends in Belgium until as late as Aug. 17, and she often visits Facebook community pages for the Tunisian and Moroccan communities in Belgium, pages that post on everything from Islamophobia to Eid holiday celebrations. Her Facebook account is now suspended, but friends with whom she exchanged messages, and whose profiles show evidence of sympathy to the Islamic State, remain

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