September 28, 2015 | Quote

The British Punk Rocker Widow Who Wants to Run ISIS’s Hackers

A navel-baring British punk rocker turned Islamic State widow is now aiming for a leadership role in the terror group’s cadre of hackers and online recruiters, United States officials believe.

Should she succeed, Sally Ann Jones, 45, would become ISIS’s most public European national to openly threaten U.S. and U.K.’s networks. She also would likely become the most influential woman in the so-called Islamic State widely known as ISIS, transforming her into a key operational figure.

“She appears to have picked up the flag of her late husband and is actively working to incite attacks and recruit new members,” a U.S. military official told The Daily Beast.

But other Western observers wonder whether Jones has the technical chops for such a role—and whether ISIS would allow a Western woman to rise so high in the organization.

Jones was once the U.K.’s most infamous defector to ISIS. Now she could be a major target of the kind of U.S.-led coalition airstrikes that killed her husband, 21-year-old Junaid Hussein, who led ISIS’s hacking campaign until his August death.

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“She is a fanatic but as far as we know she has no hacking skills,” said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Washington D.C.-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “It’s not clear what is going on beneath the surface.”

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Read the full article here.

Issues:

Syria