MOSCOW, September 22 (RIA Novosti) – The Anonymous hacker and activist group has decided to launch a cyber war against the Islamic State (IS), also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), France24 TV channel reported Monday.
"We plan to attack several countries that were knowingly supporting ISIS financially including Turkey and Saudi Arabia. We warned that if they continued to support ISIS we would be forced to destroy their virtual infrastructure. And yes we have those who can do this," a member of Anonymous told France24 in an interview aired on the Tech24 TV show.
"What we decided to do is instead of attacking them directly we decided to attack their ideologies with truth and logic," the man noted.
"We took this initiative in order to establish two things: one - we needed the public to understand how urgent the situation is in Iraq…the second reason was that we needed to make sure the public knew that ISIS did not represent the Islamic religion," the Anonymous member explained.
"We also made it clear that the United States was not free of blame as it has directly and indirectly contributed to the crisis we see today," the man said.
The IS has recently released several online videos, promoting radical Islam and capturing the executions of several hostages, including American journalist James Foley. The militants said Foley was executed in response to US airstrikes against IS positions in Iraq. The radicals have also executed Steven Sotloff, a US journalist, and David Haines, a UK humanitarian aid worker.
On September 10, US President Barack Obama announced his strategy of defeating the IS.
The president's plan includes forming an international coalition to fight the radical organization and authorizing US airstrikes against IS positions in Syria, while simultaneously continuing airstrikes in Iraq, which the United States authorized in August.
The United States also plans to provide support, equipment and training to Kurdish and Iraqi forces and Syria's opposition to respond to the IS threat.
Gulf Cooperation Council members, including Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, together with Egypt, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon have agreed to join the US-led coalition.
Turkey has stressed that its involvement in the US-led campaign against the IS would be limited to humanitarian operations only.
The IS is a Sunni jihadist group that has been fighting the Syrian government since 2012. In June 2014, the group extended its attacks to northern and western Iraq, declaring a caliphate on the territories under its control later that month.
