A Kiwi jihadist who claimed to be fighting in Syria with the IS has been mistakenly broadcasting his exact location after forgetting to turn off the tracking function on his phone.Mohammad Daniel, also known as Abu Abdul Rahman, and formerly known as Mark John Taylor, has now deleted dozens of posts from Twitter after discovering that he had been revealing his location to intelligence agencies and enemies keeping tabs on him.
Daniel's posts apparently show that in October this year he was with IS in Kafar Roma. His tweets stopped around the time that the Syrian Army made a strong push into the area. He then went off the grid for several months while fighting in the desert and finally retreating to IS stronghold Al Tabqah in early December.
Daniel sent several tweets from Al Tabqah which allowed Canada-based open source intelligence research group iBRABO to pinpoint a specific house in the southwest of the city that he had "predominantly used" from December 3-10.
A recent photo update - which shows the face of another IS fighter - showed Daniel to be on the move again. Weyers said, "No doubt this is a better alternative than being targeted by a drone strike or any group with the operational capabilities to target his short lived home in Al Tabqah."
Daniels' tweets will further hamper future plans of a return home. While in Aleppo in September, he claimed to have been in touch with the New Zealand's government in a bid to get a new passport after burning his last one.
Daniels was friends with another New Zealand extremist, Muslim Bin John. He went to see John in Yemen in 2009, which led to him being recommended for travel restrictions. John, suspected of ties to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, was killed in a drone strike last year.
In 2009, Daniel was arrested in Pakistan while trying to gain access to an al-Qaeda and Taliban stronghold near the Afghanistan border and was subsequently subjected to travel restrictions.
He left New Zealand again in May 2012 and worked as an English teacher in Indonesia for two years. In June of this year, he entered Syria across the Turkish border "as a soldier for Allah".