Alaa Esayed, whose account was listed as important by al-Qaida, gets three and a half years for tweeting messages that encouraged terrorism

A young woman who admitted being a “Twitter terrorist” on a massive scale has been jailed for three and a half years.

Alaa Esayed, 22, posted more than 45,000 tweets in Arabic on an open account to her 8,240 followers between June 2013 and May 2014, with many encouraging violent jihad.

Her account, which bore a profile of a woman in a burka with one finger raised and holding a kalashnikov, even came to the attention of al-Qaida, which listed it as among the 66 most important jihadi accounts.

Esayed, from Kennington, south London, was sentenced at the Old Bailey on Thursday after pleading guilty to encouraging terrorism and disseminating a terrorist publication.

The judge Charles Wide told her: “This material and its dissemination is an important factor in the encouragement of young men and women to travel abroad and engage in acts of terrorism.

“It is a matter of great and justified public concern. You were disseminating such material on a massive scale over a period of just short of a year. An indication of how busy you were in this activity is that on a site associated with al-Qaida your Twitter account was noted to be one of 66 important jihadi accounts.”

The judge added: “The material you were disseminating encouraged young men to go and fight and you now accept that was your intention and, furthermore, to encourage women to go to support them and indeed to bring up their children in the belief that it is their duty to take up arms to wage violent jihad and embrace martyrdom.

“And furthermore to encourage mothers to be proud of their sons who die as martyrs.”

He said the material, which was also posted on Instagram, included graphic images of corpses and prisoners about to be beheaded. Wide said it was a feature of the case that Esayed continually changed her story after she was arrested until her guilty plea in April.

He told her she knew “perfectly well” what she had been doing, despite initially claiming she only wanted to learn about Muslim struggles in Iraq, Syria and Palestine and was merely cutting and pasting from other sources with her limited understanding of written Arabic.

In mitigation, the defendant said she was promoting the interests of the Sunni community in Iraq from Shia military forces. Because of her “blatant untruthfulness” the judge said, he had difficulty accepting anything she said through her lawyer.

However, he did accept there was no evidence to suggest she was planning to engage in terrorism herself or had posted anything of a “practical nature”.



Esayed was brought up in Mosul, Iraq, and came to Britain with her family in 2007 after her father, who worked for the military, was forced to flee the country.

Most of Esayed’s posts were cut and pasted from other sources and she insisted she did not support violent jihad. She had no intention of being a martyr and she could not even read or write Arabic well, a statement to police after her arrest said.

Her lawyer, Tanveer Qureshi, said in mitigation: “Yes, she is a Twitter terrorist, but she is a Twitter terrorist who lacked creativity. She did not have a blog. She was blindly cutting and pasting.” He said her postings were just propaganda and there was no practical advice to any budding terrorists.

Esayed was supported in court by her father. Wide noted that she came from a “close-knit and concerned family”, adding: “It is moving to see your father here – he must be very upset by what you have done and the position you find yourself [in].”