U.S. Cities on ISIS Kill List-Truth! & Misleading!
Summary of eRumor:
An ISIS kill list of U.S. cities circulated on social media sites after the November 13, 2015, terrorist attacks on Paris left 129 people dead.
The Truth:
A so-called ISIS kill list of U.S. cities has been misrepresented on social media sites.
The terrorist group released the ISIS kill list in March 2015. At the time, ISIS released the names, photos and home addresses of U.S. Armed Forces personnel who it said had taken part in the war on terror and called for extremists to attack them in their hometowns.
ISIS was able to get the contact info for U.S. Armed Forces personnel by hacking into Department of Defense servers. A local news station in Texas reporting on the data breach released a list of 56 U.S. cities that the military personnel lived in, and said that security in those cities would likely be heightened. That list of 56 U.S. cities is exactly the same as the ISIS kill list that went viral after the November 2015 terrorist attacks on Paris:
Texas: Abilene, New Braunfels, San Antonio, Wyle, Fort Hood, Bedford, Killeen
Indiana: Michigan City, Bolivar
Michigan: Dearborn Heights, Lake Orion
Connecticut: Barkhamsted, Manchester
Nevada: Reno
Georgia: Griffin
Maryland: Upper Marlboro, Warrensburg, Lexington Park
Arizona: Phoenix
Louisiana: Shreveport, Bossier City
South Carolina: Daniel Island, Charleston
North Carolina: Fayetteville, New Bern
Virginia: Burke, Virginia Beach, Suffolk, Springfield, Norfolk, Chesapeake
Colorado: Colorado Springs
California: Hanford, Solvang, San Ardo, Monterrey, Newberry Park, Carlsbad
New Mexico: Farmington
North Dakota: Minot
South Dakota: Rapid City
Florida: Merritt Island, Palm Coast, Saint John, Middleburg, Saint Augustine
Washington: Colton, Cheney, Seattle, Spokane, Anacortes
Nebraska: Bellevue
Illinois: Orland Park
Rhode Island: Newport
Idaho: Bonners Ferry
So, it’s true that an ISIS kill list was released — but the kill list named specific military personnel members, not entire U.S. cities, and the kill list was not released in the wake of deadly terrorist attacks on Paris in November 2015.
After the attack on Paris, however, ISIS did threaten to attack at least one city in the U.S. In a video released after the Paris attack, an ISIS terrorist warned:
“We say to the states that take part in the crusader campaign that, by God, you will have a day, God willing, like France’s and by God, as we struck France in the center of its abode in Paris, then we swear that we will strike America at its center in Washington,” the man said.
Reuters reports that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security did not have “specific credible information of an attack on the U.S. homeland,” that the threat would be taken seriously.