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ISIS’s Communication Strategies Essay

Updated September 14, 2022
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ISIS’s Communication Strategies Essay essay

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Over the course of history, violent political movements have had different ways to communicate and to interact with their supporters, engage with their audiences and oppose their adversaries. The internet provides enormous opportunities for violet extremists on a global level. Besides propaganda, digital technologies have changed the dynamics of radical mobilization, recruitment and participation.

The studies on the dynamics and trends of violent extremism on the Internet are especially important for the current development of the jihadist threat following its collapse and the decline in the number of jihadist assaults in the West since 2017. The decrease in attacks makes the web and its way of communication crucial for ISIS’s propaganda, mobilization, planning attacks and financing. The fast evolution of technology and the vast variety of digital platforms have allowed extremists to rapidly adapt and employ new communication techniques. In the 1980s, American’s extreme right-wing militias were the first to understand the internet’s potential, but since then, the usage of the internet has significantly increased. Initially, traditional “empty” websites were replaced by forums, and chat rooms, then by social media and finally by encrypted messaging applications. As Ambassador Alberto Fernandez, Director of Strategic Counter-Terrorism Communications at the US Department of State, states, Islamic State content is ‘the gold standard in propaganda in terms of quality and quantity.’

This chapter will try to cover the ways they communicate, but also how they make use of the virtual world through different methods such as cyberattacks, “doxing”, recruitment, propaganda and financing. Isis is also the first organization which exploits effectively propaganda and media resources such as Internet websites and different new communication technologies, and plays a key role in inspiring and agitating young people to join the battlefield in Syria and Iraq to carry out terrorist attacks in the West. The communication policy of Isis focuses on four main channels: Internet forums, Official Media Channels, social media platforms and encrypted communication.

Throughout the introductory part of this chapter, the present relationship between violent extremism and the means provided by digital communications technologies, particularly the web, will be examined.

The internet, as everyone knows, is a key environment for violent extremism and terrorism across the ideological range. Decades earlier, when the worldwide jihadist movement was in its infancy, the supporters of Islamic extremists distributed their sermons on audio tapes, replicated one by one, and transferred from one follower to another. It should be remembered that U.S. far-right militias were the first in the 1980s to realize the potential of the Internet. The use has significantly expanded since then. Throughout the years, blogs and chat rooms have replaced mainstream extremist websites; and social media eventually encrypted messaging app. In the future, the so-called dark web could represent the new challenge of stopping ISIS communicate and its propaganda.

In order to draw wide crowds, in particular young people from the West, oranizations such as ISIS will also continue to pursue revolutionary means of advertising through digital media, such as TV, radio stations or even electronic magazines, released in PDF formats. The strategic communication strategy is based on the premise that “communication and terrorism go hand in hand because communication is the oxygen of terrorist acts”.

Dabiq and E-Books: branding ISIS

Since the establishment of the Khilafah on June 29th, ISIS’s al-Hayat Media Center launched an online magazine called Dabiq. ISIS has adapted and developed its predecessors ‘publicity tactics through the use of electronic social media, the retweeting and posting of its supporters to spread its message. Dabiq is the name of a village located in Northwest Syria, an international reference to Islamic religious symbolism. They believe that the inevitable combat between Muslims and their enemies will take place in Dabiq before the final defeat of Romans in Constantinople. Every Dabiq article begins with a quote by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of the party, “The spark has been lit here in Iraq, and its heat will continue to intensify – by Allah’s permission – until it burns the crusader armies in Dabiq”. The aim of this statement is to bind the Sunni’s insurgency in Iraq against the United States, with the expected extension of the ‘blessed jihad’ from Iraq to Sham.

Through using vivid graphics, its thematic architecture and innovated use of languages, Dabiq has developed and revolutionized the recruiting methods of foreign fighters. Initially it ran about 30-45 pages, but as the reputation of this group increased and Daesh propaganda became widely available in international media sources, Dabiq’s content had grown to 83 pages.

The magazine Dabiq focuses manly on the problems of tawhid (unity), manhaj (truth-seeking), hirjah (migration), jihad(holy war) and reports, articles and propaganda visual imagery. Fifteen different magazines are currently available, with different headlines like : “Just Terror”, “From the Battle of Al-Ahzab to the War of Coalitions”, “The Laws of All or the Laws of Men”, “They Plot and Allah Plots”, “Shari’ah Alone Will Rule Africa”, “Remaining and Expanding” and “The Flood”.

This new published issue is called ‘Break the Cross.’ Unlike previous issues, which where primarily focused on Muslim-majority communities, this issue is full of propaganda aimed at converting non-Muslims to the Islamic State’s puritanical and bloodthirsty interpretation of Islam, it is targeted at discrediting Christianity and Western secularism. A dual approach is described in the paper. First, ISIS asks the residents of Europe to “abandon their infidelity and accept Islam, the religion of sincerity and submission to the Lord of the heavens and the earth’. At the other side, they threaten a continuous war against those who don’t say, “we call you to reflect on these questions as the bloodthirsty knights of the Caliphate continue to wage their war of just terror against you”. Parts include some titles such as “Why we hate you and fight you”, along with the story of conversion from a former Christian woman who used to live in Finland, entitled “Why I came to Islam”.

In addition to online publications, ISIS also utilizes more mainstream marketing techniques, such as advertising brochures for the target audience: the families of foreign fighters. The goal here is to recruit them to IS territories in order to strengthen the position of ISIS as a ‘rising state.’

An example of this kind of organized correspondence is ‘Islamic State News,’ another publication produced by the al-Hayat Media Center of ISIS. Since June 2014, the weekly publication highlights the progress of the caliphate, highlighting both its military successes and the assistance given to the community.

The study of the ISIS’s Communications Strategy of Jihad Magazines would not be complete without mentioning ISIS’s production of e-books. These are published through Twitter via links and are available in a.pdf format. The production of such e-books started in November 2012, but became more influential in 2015 after an ISIS associate, frequently banned from Twitter, who had several accounts, began promoting the latest e-book released by the caliphate: ‘Islamic State 2015.’ It has 100 pages, written in English, with information about the Islamic State. This book is the eighth book in the series of the “Black Flag Books”, which are widely advertised in jihadist forums, and it shows again the Islamic State’s versatile use of different media parts. The titles of the e-books “Black Flag Books” published so far are:

  1. Black Flags from the East (Khorasan) (November 2012).
  2. Black Flags from Syria (May 2013).
  3. Black Flags from Arabia (September 2013).
  4. Black Flags from Persia (Iran) (October 2014).
  5. Black Flags from Rome (November 2014).
  6. Miracles in Syria (2013).
  7. Martyrs of Syria (2014).
  8. The Islamic State (2015).

Such e-books specifically threaten the surrounding countries of the caliphate, where IS aims to spread and where it already claims a considerable level of political and organizational power, due to the internal conflicts with the Islamic community.

As far as communication is involved, ‘Islamic State 2015’ is an intriguing product. While it is not especially detailed and the majority of the magazines are of a higher quality, this version seems like a hurried one, using a lot of infographics taken from Western media and showing them from a caliphate viewpoint. ISIS’s media strategy has become a strategic pillar, it does not say something new about Islamic State, but the books are intended to reflect the perspective of the Caliphate and are targeted at a broader Western audience and, in particular, new recruits.

Within this book, several significant pages are found at 80-81, named ‘The Islamic State Online,’ where it states that the Islamic State does not have its own webpage, all of its propaganda and communication depends on professionally edited videos, social media accounts, e-books and e-magazines, making their online world very similar to the real world, which are decentralized. For example, in real life, nobody know where ISIS leader , Ibrahim al Hashemi al Qurayshi is positioned. This is really critical for ISIS, since by shielding the leader’s location, no one can easily assassinate him. Similar to that, by not getting a website, no one can hack it and claim an online win. The contents of the Islamic State from videos to e-books are spread all over the internet, just like the numerous provinces of the Islamic State are spread in separate areas.

Through decentralizing everything from the core leadership, even if a province struggles online or offline, the Caliphate leadership project and overall leadership is still secure and can expand elsewhere. And though Muslims have been attempting to inform people about Islam for the past 20 years, there has been more ‘Islamic State’ searches on YouTube in the last 3 years than there have been for ‘Islam’ since YouTube has been created. By all this we may conclude that people are more interested in Islam nowadays as it is a real practical entity (State) rather than a vague concept.

It is a powerful statement, in terms of communications. Again, it seeks to strengthen the image of ISIS as a proper ‘State,’ it is likely to bring new recruits and ‘destabilize’ Western readers. The descriptions of Islamic State’s complicated and detailed communication plan that we presented explicitly show that it is all part of a specific, organized, and coordinated attempt to accomplish the overarching objective of the caliphate: identification as a State.

In addition to all this, social media also play an important role during terrorist attacks. ISIS’s online fighters can easily create different posts and tweets that intensify fears, suspicions and information chaos among audiences and authorities, and these posts and tweets may contain unconfirmed threats, exaggerated data and descriptions. Why this is so hard to deal with is because it is hard to manage and to separate the true threats from the fake ones, and it is also hard to identify it these threats come from jihadist militants, sympathizers of jihadism or neutral Internet users. This type of communication is generally used before official statements are delivered after terrorist attacks.

Various terrorist organizations have maintained Twitter accounts since at least 2010, making the usage of twitter the secondary mean of communication because in their opinions they had poor secuirty in the past and encrypting tools. While public and official Twitter accounts of ISIS have been more or less removed from the social network, ISIS has succeeded effectively in developing coping mechanisms to maintain power over information sources in this network after Twitter took a stronger approach to ISIS’s Twitter use in the summer of 2014. ISIS has also established accounts with strict privacy policies, the content of which is disseminated through the use of hashtags in several smaller, non-official accounts. They developed a series of hashtag promotions with various keywords such as ‘# AllEyesonISIS’ or ‘# CalamityWillBefallUS,’ aiming for Twitter to trend these keywords and to give the tweets a lot of exposure.

ISIS was also trying to connect to alternative social networks like Friendica, Quitter and Diaspora, but with little success; in fact, Friendica and Quitter were able to delete the organization’s presence on their pages, Diaspora removed ISIS accounts in August 2014 after ISIS’s online video posting, and Twitter followed a more aggressive strategy of removing ISIS and pro-ISIS pages, especially after they released a video showing the beheading of an American journalist.

A way to access information from ISIS on smartphones is via the ‘Dawn of Glad Tidings’ app. ISIS also earns the ability to post tweets from users’ Twitter accounts–thereby becoming automatic ISIS propaganda sources. This led to the emanation of roughly 44.000 tweets during March while the Mosul strike happened. ISIS were creative with their media strategies, and managed to hijack trending hashtags during the World Cup in 2014, such as #Brazil2014, to appear in the linked Twitter searches so that a large mass of propaganda videos are distributed.

The use of Twitter by ISIS was also seen back in 2015 during a terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris. ISIS followers released a disturbing photo of a dead police officer lying on the ground. It referred to the first news of the attack showing a terrorist firing at a police officer who was trying to help people executed in the Charlie Hebdo editorial board. Twitter accounts used by ISIS released a image of a killed police officer with short inscriptions: “If we do not revenge the Prophet, we do not will know prosperity” and “The attack against the newspaper which published pictures insulting the Prophet”.

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