Newsweek | Dozens of Islamic State (ISIS) fighters have infiltrated a Saudi Arabian border town via Iraq before melting away into the general population, according to claims by the terror group’s supporters on social media.
A famous anti-government Saudi tweeter known as ‘mujtahidd’, not known for ISIS sympathies, posted to his 1.2m followers that an attack was carried out on border guards with the help of a cell inside the Kingdom before they reached the town of Rafha, sparking a search by Saudi intelligence services.
ISIS-affiliated social media accounts started circulating a photo of a border checkpoint they claimed had been captured by the terror group’s militants.
“They claim that they control [the border gate],” says Kovan Direj, a Syrian-Kurdish journalist monitoring the Twitter war. “They [claim they] went to the border gate and after that group melted into the city and now the secret service of the Saudi Arabians are looking for them.”
While analysts have cautioned that no official confirmation of the border infiltration has been released by Saudi Arabia or ISIS, there has been a large-scale propaganda war between ISIS supporters and Saudi citizens using the hashtag #Rafha to claim that the raid either did or did not happen.
