Police in Europe and North America have seized servers and data from ISIS propaganda outlets in a multi-country operation aimed at tracking down extremists and crimping the organization's ability to spread its ideology, European agency Europol announced Friday.
It said the two-day operation that started on Wednesday was led by Belgian prosecutors and also involved authorities in the US, Canada, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Bulgaria and Romania.
The "simultaneous multinational takedown" was coordinated via Europol's headquarters in The Hague with the support of Eurojust, the EU agency for judicial cooperation in criminal matters.
Britain's Counter Terrorism Internet Referral Unit was also involved in identifying "top-level domain registrars abused by ISIS, Europol said.
They notably targeted the ISIS-branded Amaq news agency, al-Bayan radio, and Halumu and Nashir news sites.
Amaq spreads information online in at least nine languages and has been used to claim ISIS attacks in multiple countries, mostly recently a deadly supermarket hostage-taking in southern France.
The operation was the culmination of efforts started in late 2015, after coordinated ISIS attacks that killed 130 people in Paris.
"With this ground-breaking operation we have punched a big hole in the capability of ISIS to spread propaganda online and radicalize young people in Europe," the head of Europol Rob Wainwright said.
