By Hussain Ehsani

After the attack of Al-Baghdadi most of the jihadi fighters in Telegram and Whatsapp asked each other to pray for health of the “Caliph”. Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi’s message was widely spread among jihadi fighters through Whatsapp and Telegram as “new Guidelines” from the “caliph”. (Atwan 2015, 233)

Islamic state recruits all its “voluntary” recruitment through the social media. This is a very serious issue that social media have become platform and means of recruitment and propagation.

Given that there are several ‘Islamic State’ branches in the world, most of the states are under the threat of violent extremist groups especially central Asia. Despite military confrontations and defeat of IS, the phenomenon of violent extremism continues. They might be defeated in the battlefield, but these groups still fight in the social media. Thus, with the ongoing virtual warfare, it is very necessary to understand the dynamics of violent extremist groups in social media.

After death of Abu Musa’b Al-Zarqawi, new generation of extremist groups were shaped. This new generation is very active in virtual media, print media, radio, TV and online videos. This group that does not have an actual leader was named “virtual jihadists”. (Abdulhussain 2019)

After 2011, social media was used for mass protests and expression of outrage against governments, and hope about future of “a revolution”. The masses used social media to spread videos, pictures and contents against governments, to shake them. (Castells 2012, 25)

Amid Globalization, emerging social media, ease of access to internet, and experience of the Arab Spring, after 2011, extremist groups like Al-Qaeda in Iraq and Islamic State of Iraq, used social media to terrorize people. They used social media in the virtual world as a weapon in battlefield. It is true that they fought in battlefield but social media most of the times acted as the front line of warfare.  

According to Callimachi and Shiloach (2015), Islamic State views media as an important tool to brand itself and promote group’s extremist ideology. Further, it used to run a sophisticated and centralized media machine with its own news agency called Amaq, Dabiq magazine in Arabic and English, as well as the Al Bayan radio station in Mosul that also featured a mobile app. (Callimachi and Shiloach 2015)

Media can be used as a tool by terrorists to spread fear. Scholar argue that terrorism and propaganda are closely connected. Without media coverage and propaganda, the impact of the terrorists’ activities and their imagined and real influence cannot be noticed by the public.

For the terrorist groups, violent behavior is symbolic as they are meant to send different messages beyond the creation of fear. This indicates why terrorists groups find it imperative to actively spread information about their ideology and various activities along many media outlets, especially social media. The ultimate main objectives of using propaganda are to create fear, mobilize people to support terrorist attacks, and disrupt the efforts by their opponent (Wilkinson 1997).

Since the modern media era, propaganda has been utilized as a mobilization tool by a wide range of organizations, and ISIS has invested heavily in the use of propaganda. From its early emergence, ISIS has become well known for using various propaganda methods and approaches to brand itself to the world in different languages. (Farwell et.al 2014).

ISIS cultivated an online media strategy that has been labeled Jihad 3.0 (Al-Rawi 2016) due to its highly sophisticated media campaign that involves the use of multidimensional propaganda.

Some of the documents retrieved from Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad demonstrate his emphasis on the role of online media. Bin Laden said “media occupies the greater portion of the battle today”. Further, in a letter he sent in 2002 to the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, Bin Laden said, “It is obvious that the media war in this century is one of the strongest methods. Al-Zawahiri, mentioned also said, “We are in a battle, and more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media”. (Al-rawi and Groshek 2018, 6)

Abu Bakr Naji, the author of “The Administration of Savagery”, defines the Jihadist’s war as “media battles” (Naji 2004).

Naji says that members of the general public have to be persuaded first, emphasizing that the “role of media politics is to gain people’s sympathy, or at least neutralize them” (Naji 2004). In other words, media should play three functions including persuading a large number of people to join the jihad, “offering positive support, and adopting a negative attitude toward those who do not join the ranks” (Naji 2004, 50). Media should also address people living outside the group’s control to instigate them “to fly to the regions which we manage, particularly the youth after news of our transparency and truthfulness reaches them” (Al-rawi and Groshek 2018, 6).

Several audio-visual materials released by ISIS emphasize on the importance of media in supporting the Islamic State in line with Naji’s recommendations. In one example, in the Shumukh Instigation Workshop, a video titled “Journalist, you’re a Jihadist” leader of Shumukh said: “Your support lifts the morale of Islamic State fighters”. “Your tweets are your weapons”, he added, and that those who tweet for Islamic State are also “mujahedeen just like those who are fighting in the field”. Other Islamic State efforts to educate its followers on the use of Twitter have come from Afaaq Electronic Foundation, which is specifically focused on “raising security and technical awareness” among Jihadists (Al-rawi and Groshek 2018, 6).

Islamic State systematic media strategies also included sophisticated digital recruitment and radicalization efforts through “virtual coaches” that often employed encrypted social media. For example, when Islamic State wanted to recruit a member in some country through Twitter, they asked them to use ChatSecure mobile app. (Ibid, 9)

In relation to online media, some experts introduced the concept of “Netwars” to describe the situation in which various groups seem to be small, dispersed, and often disorganized in what is termed as an “internetted” practice. This new sociotechnical reality defines the nature of the “cyber army” of Islamic State, and it increases the difficulty of curbing its online influence. Islamic State uses only a few centralized Twitter accounts that “tweet official statements and news updates” as well as provincial accounts run from the provinces Islamic State controls “which publish a live feed about [local] Islamic State operations”. However, sympathizers and followers on social media largely operate without centralization or an “obvious hierarchical structure,” suggesting that online activity is largely “driven by self-organization. (Kingsley 2014)

Besides, Islamic States also supported hacking groups which could be regarded as part of its cyber army. For example, the Cyber Caliphate as well as the Hackers’ Union of the Caliphate were one of Islamic States’ tools to exert influence as it often boasted of any successful attempts at hacking websites or social media outlets by using a network of sympathetic hackers from different parts of the world (Al-rawi and Groshek 2018, 11).

Reportedly, there were approximately five hacking groups affiliated with ISIS that began working together in April 2016 under one banner called the “United Cyber Caliphate”. The efforts of these hacking groups also included blocking people or organizations on mobile apps and social media. It is important to say that an estimated 46,000 Twitter accounts were sympathetic or supportive of the Islamic State (Al-rawi and Groshek 2018, 11).

The decentralized nature of social media communication by ISIS sympathizers makes it challenging to counter ISIS messages.

There is huge relation between Islamic State Central Asia and other branches of IS, such as, Khorasan Province and Islamic States in India Province. They are trying to implement the main strategy of Islamic State Central into the two other branches. It is very important to understand the dynamism of violent groups in terms of psychological and media warfare.

In the panel, I showed how Islamic State uses social media for the purpose of propaganda, to spread fear, violence and savagery, as well as, recruitment. It is true that military confrontation has been successful in some countries like Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, But so far no victory in psychological and virtual war.

For this purpose, governments ought to establish a center of media to confrontation against violent extremist media warfare. These centers can expand the intellectual and media warfare. The experience of Al-Sawab center in Saudi Arabia and Al-Hidaya center in Emirate are very useful to combat the virtual war.

The 3rd Expert Symposium on the Digital Dimensions of violent extremist in Central Asia is best opportunity to shape a regional plan for Media and intellectual confrontation against violent extremist groups.

Bibliography:

Al-Rawi, Ahmed. “Anti-ISIS Humor: Cultural Resistance of Radical Ideology.” Politics, Religion & Ideology 17, no. 1 (February 2016): 52–68. https://doi.org/10.1080/21567689.2016.1157076.

Callimachi, Rukmini. “A News Agency With Scoops Directly From ISIS, and a Veneer of Objectivity.” The New York Times, January 14, 2016. http://nyti.ms/1lbIyHh.

Interview with Yaser Abdulhussain, Iraqi Expert, 2019  

Castells, Manuel. Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2015.

Callimachi, Rukmini. “A News Agency With Scoops Directly From ISIS, and a Veneer of Objectivity.” The New York Times, January 14, 2016. http://nyti.ms/1lbIyHh.  

Shiloach, Gilad. “This New ISIS App Brings Terror Straight To Your Cell Phone.” Vocativ. Vocativ, November 30, 2015. https://www.vocativ.com/news/255768/this-new-isis-app-brings-terror-straight-to-your-cell-phone/index.html.

Wilkinson, Paul. “The Media and Terrorism: A Reassessment.” Terrorism and Political Violence 9, no. 2 (1997): 51–64. https://doi.org/10.1080/09546559708427402.

Farwell, James P. “The Media Strategy of ISIS.” Survival 56, no. 6 (February 2014): 49–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/00396338.2014.985436.

Neer, Thomas, and Mary Ellen Otoole. “The Violence of the Islamic State of Syria (ISIS): A Behavioral Perspective.” Violence and Gender 1, no. 4 (2014): 145–56. https://doi.org/10.1089/vio.2014.0037.

Winter, Charlie. “The Virtual ‘Caliphate’: Understanding Islamic State’s Propaganda Strategy”. NATO Starcom Center of Excellence. (2015a).  

Al-Rawi, Ahmed, and Jacob Groshek. “Jihadist Propaganda on Social Media.” International Journal of Cyber Warfare and Terrorism 8, no. 4 (2018): 1–15. https://doi.org/10.4018/ijcwt.2018100101.

Naji, Abu Bakr. “Al-Edarat-o-Tawahhosh (Administration of Savagery)”, (2004)

Kingsley, Patrick. “Who Is behind Isiss Terrifying Online Propaganda Operation?” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, June 23, 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/23/who-behind-isis-propaganda-operation-iraq.

Hussain Ehsani is a researcher at Afghan Institute for Strategic Studies.

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