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The Islamic State’s Use Of Media

Self-proclaimed caliphate, and denounced terrorist organisation by the United Nations and many individual governments, the Islamic State has long been using both traditional and new media platforms to spread propaganda and disperse ideological content. Attentively planned and well-timed social media campaigns, carefully staged films, and high quality texts and pictures in glossy propaganda magazines are all proof that ISIS has a full-time, perpetually active media wing that is dedicated to building and maintaining a certain image, much like a business would with a product. Most researchers agree that ISIS knows how and when to use different media platforms, whether to threaten, influence, attract, recruit or raise funds. Many studies concerning the ISIS have observed, “Media is more than half the battle”, a notion well understood by the extremist organisation.

Al-Hayat Media Centre

Al-Hayat Media Centre is a major media base of the Islamic State, dedicated to communicating with a foreign audience, unlike its other media centres (Al Furqan, Al I’tisam, and AJNAD) that majorly serve an Arabic speaking audience. Al-Hayat has been producing high quality propaganda films and texts in English, French, German and Russian since its foundation in mid 2014, in order to reach out to and perhaps, recruit, Western audiences. The media centre produces and distributes new films and articles in different languages, as well as subtitles and translates existing pro-ISIS jihadi material.

Al-Hayat does not seem to have a fixed base, with raw footage being recorded by ISIS soldiers and being assembled into HD videos in various parts of Iraq and Syria. However, it has been suggested that the media center is possibly the brainchild of Abu Talha al-Alamani, a former German rapper commonly known as Deso Dogg, who converted to Islam after a near death experience, and eventually decided to travel to Syria and fight alongside ISIS in early 2014 (just a few months before Al-Hayat was founded and began disseminating propaganda material).

The most notorious of Al-Hayat’s creations is Dabiq, ISIS’ online English magazine, based in Al Raqqa, the Islamic State's Syrian headquarters since 2014. Dabiq, titled after a Syrian city crucial in Islamic mythology, released its first issue, “The return of Khilafah” in 2014, and has since been compared to Al-Qaeda’s infamous online magazine, Inspire. However, it has been observed that Dabiq significantly differs from Inspire in its purpose. While Inspire mostly attempts to encourage its readers to execute solo terrorist attacks on the West, Dabiq is more focused on spreading ISIS’ ideology and encouraging readers to abandon their lives and homes and emigrating to and working with the Islamic State (hijrah). Al-Hayat has, time and again, relentlessly used Dabiq to covey the ISIS’ extreme and blatant hostility towards other religious groups and belief systems. In 2016, Al-Hayat released a new English magazine, Rumiyah, which some concluded was set to replace Dabiq, but these speculations have yet to be verified.

Other notable productions by Al Hayat include French online magazine Dar-al-Islam and its Turkish counterpart Konstantiniyye.

Social Media

With the advent of social media, terrorist organisations have taken to using platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to spread propaganda. The Islamic State has been quick to realise the power of social media and has very strategically used it as a major weapon in its arsenal.

ISIS has been particularly inclined towards using Twitter as a platform for dispersing its ideological messages. The group uses Twitter, which has an active user-base of about 228 million people worldwide, to publicise executions and beheadings of prisoners, and to announce hatred towards any and all perceived enemies. A study conducted by J.M. Berger and Jonathan Morgan, “The ISIS Twitter Censure”, in 2015, attempted to decipher the control and influence of pro- ISIS Twitter users and their messages over social media platforms. The study concluded that around 46,000 Twitter active accounts were being used to support and glorify ISIS. Although the number of pro-ISIS accounts seems rather huge, Berger also argued that these accounts are a very small proportion of the entire Twitter community. However, Scott Galloway, a professor of marketing and a scholar of brand influence on social media warned that the IS’ level of influence, owing to its widespread interaction on social media, is probably far greater than mere numbers would imply.

ISIS frequently disseminates messages on Twitter by organising timely hashtag campaigns. One of the group’s most infamous hashtag campaigns has been the “one billion campaign” which strove to garner support from Muslims around the world to proudly support and assist ISIS’ purpose. The campaign has been seen by researchers as one of ISIS’ many well-planned strategies to radicalise Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

In order to circumvent various social media bans, the ISIS has even developed an Android app – The Dawn of Glad Tidings – which allows the group to automatically post tweets on behalf of anyone who downloads the app and registers.Studies show that when the terror group conquered Mosul, the app generated 40,000 tweets from users’ accounts in one day.

The Islamic State’s most targeted and exploited audience, especially through social media platforms, are teenagers and young adults. Experts and scholars have argued that ISIS realises and exploits (i) the youth's constant involvement and engagement with social media platforms, (ii) the youth’s vulnerability, and (iii) the youth’s search for a cause and grand purpose in life.There is growing concern amongst researchers and governments over how easily the social media tirade conducted by the radical terror group can engulf young minds. The instance of three British schoolgirls - Kadiza Sultana, Shamima Begum and Amira Abase- who travelled to Syria in February 2015 to marry jihadi militants, has been much discussed by the media as an example of the threat ISIS’ reach poses to vulnerable teenagers who do not realise the full consequences of their decisions.

Asher Abid Khan, who fled from his family in the U.S. in 2014, at the age of 19, is another example of ISIS’ ability to lure the misguided and underdeveloped judgement of the youth. Prior to his leaving his family home in Texas, Asher had been communicating with many radicals online, mainly on Facebook, about becoming a martyr for the Islamic State. Although Khan never made it to the war-zone, having backed out last minute in Istanbul, en route to Syria, he now faces conspiracy and terrorism charges back home in the U.S. and could be imprisoned for up to 30 years.

Another reason why ISIS’ social media engagement is concerning and highly successful, is because of the the group’s tendency to romanticise its cause and the goals it claims to be working towards. The Islamic State is constantly portraying itself on social media as a community where people may feel like they belong and have a purpose. Academic Fawaz Gerges, in his work “The New Middle East: Protest and Revolution” discusses how the Islamic State is winning the social media battle by appealing to people by offering them a sense of identity and a calling, although misplaced. In an interview with CNN in 2015, Gerges explains how ISIS is enticing “deluded” minds by proposing “ a utopian political project”.

Engaging and influencing women

The Islamic State has not been slow in realising the potential women have not only to spread the group’s propaganda, but also to act on it. In fact, ISIS clearly capitalises on its media expertise to influence and radicalise women, who, the group claims, are just as important as men in waging jihad and are a valued asset. Using various social media platforms, IS frequently calls on women to travel to Syria and fulfil their religious duties (''fard') by serving as militants, brides to ISIS soldiers, producing and raising the next generation of militants and managing logistics such as food and medical aid for fighters. Even in traditional media, such as propaganda videos and magazine discussions, the group does not overlook women and addresses concerns such as their possible life when living under the Islamic State and what it means to be a jihadi bride.

In a study, academic Mia Bloom dismisses the idea that women are only minor participants or mere bystanders of terrorism. Instead, women are a source of underestimated strength for a terrorist organisation such as ISIS. Bloom provides statistics and asserts that there have been 257 (reported) female suicide bombers between the years 1985-2010. Bloom discusses the crucial role of women in the Islamic State and describes how the group’s all women religious police unit, Al Khansaa Brigade, backs ISIS’ views and spreads propaganda by communicating with women outside the Islamic State, as well as regulating and punishing the ones within.

Some ISIS brides play crucial roles in recruiting other women from different parts of the world. One of ISIS’ most notorious female recruiters, Umm Ubaydah, is an active and adept social media user, and frequently uses Twitter and Tumblr to interact with girls across the world, who may be curious about ISIS or life as a woman in the Islamic State. Once recruiters like Umm Ubaydah become more certain of the girls’ intentions, they move the conversations to more private platforms such as Kik, WhatsApp, and particularly Telegram, because the encrypted app allows senders to get sent messages to self-destruct once they have been read. Rumoured to have emigrated to Syria from Sweden when she was only a teenager, Umm Ubaydah, now in her early 20s, can communicate fluently in English and is well versed with the youth’s language of slangs, memes and emoticons, making her communication with other young girls smoother and perhaps, more effective. Ubaydah and her friends, Umm Layth and Umm Haritha reach out to other girls, idealising their jihadi husbands, insisting that it is their religious duty to travel to Syria and advising them on how to make the journey without alarming authorities. Most girls getting intrigued by and involved in ISIS are in there late teens and early 20s, and owing to their youth, they are more vulnerable and more reachable through social media.

The 2016 British documentary “ISIS Women Unveiled” follows an undercover reporter as she infiltrates into a group of extremist pro-ISIS British women who come together in study circles to advocate propaganda messages. These women are shown to be communicating with not only one another through social media (especially Twitter), but also with women who have travelled to Syria and now reside under the rule of the Islamic State. These women come together, in person and virtually, to condemn democracy, other religions, and to reiterate other ISIS ideologies. Women are often not seen as strong and substantial catalysts in advancing ideas of hatred, violence and terrorism, and it is perhaps for this reason that their involvement in ISIS and the dissemination of its propaganda has not been studied in depth until recently. However, as British counter terrorism expert Hannah Stuart interviewed in the documentary states “extremist, jihadist groups have long recognised the power of women.”

Prevention

Government authorities, researchers, media experts and social media companies are all concerned with how to thwart the ISIS and its strategic media crusade. Although these different groups attempt to come together and assist one another in tackling the issue, it is often not an easy task.

While social media companies such as Twitter and Facebook try to shut down any accounts that covey a pro-ISIS sentiment or threaten to advocate terrorism in any way, these companies have limitations. First, in most cases an account is only shut down or deactivated if another user reports it. Second, people managing social media platforms are not necessarily security experts, definitely not where national security is concerned. Third, it is nearly impossible to constantly monitor the gigantic number of active, as well as, dormant accounts, and the sheer volume of content produced. In “The ISIS Twitter Census”, Berger and Morgan reported that, out of the 46,000 pro-ISIS accounts, Twitter managed to close down only around 1,000.

The hacktivist network, Anonymous, declared “war” against ISIS in a video released shortly after the 2015 Paris terror attacks. The hacktivists have pledged to disrupt ISIS’ online activities and communication by tracking and deactivating their accounts and hacking their networks.