Background

Our ISIS redditor was Israfil Yilmaz. Israfil was a Dutch citizen of Turkish origin born in Brunei. He served in the Turkish army and the royal Netherlands army. In 2012/13, he left for Syria after abandoning his family in search for jihad. In 2015, he officially became a member of ISIS. He was a famous social media personality, supposedly adored by women who're into guys like him. He had been active on Twitter, Ask.fm, Tumblr and Instagram. He has been documenting his life in Tumblr and has even done AMAs in Tumblr. All his online accounts have been deleted, but there are a lot of his images and screenshots of his Tumblr posts in the NY times articles linked above.

Reddit activity

His username in reddit is the same as all his other accounts online: /u/chechclear. Per his own admission and his other social media accounts, he's been using the nickname for years for his online activity, including gaming.

His first AMA in /r/AMA, 11 months ago, was removed by the mods. The AMA was a pretty small affair where he shares his opinions, including his less than flattering opinion on the Russian military's efficiency in Syria.

His second AMA in /r/casualiama posted shortly after his first one was much bigger with nearly 300 comments. He answered several questions, including a few asked by users in Dutch who were sceptical of his origins and he answered them seemingly fluently with none of them raising questions (example). A user speculated that he's doing the AMA from an internet cafe in Raqqa. His answers include not having enough money to own a young healthy virgin slave, threatening ex-muslims of their impending punishment for apostasy and other extremist Islamic stuff. He even hinted that he's doing the AMA without the knowledge of his "bosses". Later, he claimed that the reports of a bunch of Dutch mujahideen fighters getting killed was a hoax. These probably put him on the radar. (Bonus Israfil's opinion after being asked about Trump for /r/drama's alt-right denizens). The only supportive comment in the entire AMA was by /u/iamthessaly asking Allah to bless our ISIS fighter. /u/iamthessaly, by the looks of his comment history, seems to be a radical Islamic extremist himself.

• /r/exmuslim thread

• /r/JihadInFocus thread with more info from a few redditors who've been following this guy online on Tumblr.

RIP chechclear

His third and final AMA was in /r/IslamicState 1 month ago. It didn't go off as planned. This AMA blew up after being linked to /r/bestof. After making this post, he was reported to have been killed by an airstrike by a CNN correspondent. His death was also reported elsewhere.

P. S. There is no direct proof that /u/chechclear was Israfil, but after digging into everything online I could find about him, I have not seen anyone conclusively prove that this account was a hoax. From what I've read, there are no holes in his story, discrepancies with dates and ISIS events mentioned in his AMAs, not even one claim of his account being a hoax. The totality of his comment history, his previous social media accounts and AMAs, social media attention whoring, users who've been following the Syrian civil war and his online activity who agree this was him and no one conclusively proving this was a hoax leads me to believe that this was the real guy.

Edit: typos and readability

Edit 2: more typos