(Wired) On August 10, 2019, a woman on Facebook posted a status warning her contacts not to accept friend requests from her sister Charlotte, whose account had been hacked. She shared a screenshot of the account: an image of a blonde-haired boy dressed in desert camouflage and gripping a pistol with both his hands stared out from the screen. The image was captioned, in Arabic, “Luqmen Ben Tachafin. He does not tire. He does not bore.” Over the coming months, the account went silent, and the incident became just another story of social media hacking. That changed in March 2020, when Facebook accounts whose bios read “Luqmen Ben Tachafin. I shake your throne and destroy your dreams. Never tired, never bored, until the Judgement Day” began sharing Isis content across the platform. In a span of 87 days, 90 of them would appear — all with the same signature images and bios. Luqmen, the “destroyer of dreams.”
The accounts were part of a small army of Isis supporters on Facebook who called themselves the Fuouaris Upload network — after Fuorusiyya, the practice of equestrian fighting popular in 14th Century Islam.
