Today the Islamic State is as much a media conglomerate as a fighting force. According to Documenting the Virtual Caliphate, an October 2015 report by the Quilliam Foundation, the organization releases, on average, 38 new items per day—20-minute videos, full-length documentaries, photo essays, audio clips, and pamphlets, in languages ranging from Russian to Bengali. The group’s closest peers are not just other terrorist organizations, then, but also the Western brands, marketing firms, and publishing outfits—from PepsiCo to BuzzFeed—who ply the Internet with memes and messages in the hopes of connecting with customers. And like those ventures, the Islamic State hews to a few tried-and-true techniques for boosting user engagement.
Among these is the group’s use of narrowcasting—creating varied content that caters to niche audiences. (Think of those BuzzFeed listicles aimed at groups like Army brats or Florida natives.) Only a fraction of the Islamic State’s online output depicts the kind of sadism for which the group is notorious: Far more common are portrayals of public-works projects, economic development, and military triumphs, frequently aimed at specific Muslim enclaves throughout the world. This content is meant to convince prospective recruits of the veracity of the organization’s core narrative: that its empire is both stable and inexorably growing. (The Islamic State’s slogan is “Baqiya wa Tatamaddad”—Remaining and Expanding.) So far, digital propaganda of this sort has helped motivate more than 30,000 people to turn their backs on everything they’ve ever known and journey thousands of miles into dangerous lands, where they’ve been told a paradise awaits.
But the most significant way in which the Islamic State has exhibited its media savviness has been through its embrace of openness. Unlike al Qaeda, which has generally been methodical about organizing and controlling its terror cells, the more opportunistic Islamic State is content to crowdsource its social media activity—and its violence—out to individuals with whom it has no concrete ties. And the organization does not make this happen in the shadows; it does so openly in the West’s most beloved precincts of the Internet, co-opting the digital services that have become woven into our daily lives. As a result, the Islamic State’s brand has permeated our cultural atmosphere to an outsize degree.
This has allowed the Islamic State to rouse followers that al Qaeda never was able to reach. Its brand has become so ubiquitous, in fact, that it has transformed into something akin to an open source operating system for the desperate and deluded—a vague ideological platform upon which people can construct elaborate personal narratives of persecution or rage. Some individuals become so engrossed in those narratives that they scheme to kill in the Islamic State’s name, in the belief that doing so will help them right their troubled lives. Here in the US, the group’s message has found a foothold among people who map their own idiosyncratic struggles and grievances, real or imagined, onto the Islamic State ideology. These half-cocked jihadists, while rare, come from all walks of American life, creating a new kind of domestic threat—one that is small in scale but fiendishly difficult to counter.
This phenomenon has a historical precedent, however, which has largely been forgotten: the American skyjacking epidemic of the late 1960s and early 1970s, in which scores of wayward souls claimed fuzzy political motives for seizing commercial aircraft. Those hijackers, like the Islamic State’s crowdsourced allies, were often deeply influenced by media—in their case TV and newspaper coverage of past hijackings, which they sought to imitate. Government measures eventually brought the skyjacking crisis to a rapid halt, an outcome that will be much tougher to achieve in today’s circumstances; a reckless government crackdown would actually play into the hands of the Islamic State, which wants nothing more than to bait the US into an overreaction that erodes our unity and freedom.
So far, most attempts to neutralize the Islamic State’s media juggernaut have proven inept. That is because the architects of our countermeasures fail to grasp what makes the organization’s content and distribution method so distinctive. We must admit, however grudgingly, that the Islamic State’s propagandists are now as adept at social media as we are. They got that way by diligently analyzing how the West manufactures and consumes information. To chip away at what they’ve created, we must now learn from them.
At the 2:10 mark in a video entitled The Meaning of Stability #2, which the Islamic State released in mid-January, a soon-to-be suicide bomber appears on camera alongside his explosives-laden truck. There is nothing remarkable about the fact that this masked young man is moments away from incinerating himself and untold others in a Libyan city—such farewell scenes are common in these videos. But this is the first time an Islamic State bomber’s last moments will be captured by a drone.
A minute later, after the bomber has hugged his comrades good-bye, the drone soars high above his truck as he drives through an urban block and detonates his payload. The video shows a wide-angle shot of the carnage from the sky; it then cuts to footage of someone holding a Samsung Galaxy phone that’s displaying the drone’s-eye view of the explosion. It was a seminal moment in one of the Islamic State’s favorite media genres.
The Islamic State has long taken pride in its flair for developing content that is innovative and repugnant in equal measure. Back in 2004, when the organization was known as al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), it earned substantial notoriety by releasing videos showing the beheadings of captives such as Nick Berg, a telecommunications engineer from Pennsylvania. This novel propaganda tactic rankled Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian surgeon who was then the top deputy to al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden. He wrote a letter to AQI’s leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in which he urged him to be mindful of how depictions of extreme bloodshed might damage al Qaeda’s reputation. “I say to you that we are in a battle, and that more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media,” al Qaeda’s Zawahiri wrote. “And that we are in a media battle in a race for the hearts and minds of our Umma [Muslim people].” He asked Zarqawi to refrain from future beheadings, lest the masses be turned off by images of his cruelty.
But Zarqawi ignored his superior’s request. Cultivating broad appeal was not his plan; in the parlance of American politics, he aimed to play to the base. “Zarqawi was trying to recruit from the extremist fringe that gets excited by this sort of behavior,” says Will McCants, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Middle East Policy and the author of The ISIS Apocalypse. Zarqawi’s videos, spread via Internet forums and email, made their way onto the hard drives of aspiring jihadists who were energized by their gore. Zarqawi believed that attracting such vicious fighters was the key to fulfilling his fantasy of creating an Islamic state.
As Zarqawi was pioneering his video strategy, a jihadist theorist who wrote under the pseudonym Abu Bakr Naji published an ebook that would become the Islamic State’s blueprint: 2004’s The Management of Savagery. The book argued that jihadist groups should venture into regions beset by anarchy, where local populations would welcome their ability to institute basic governance and Islamic sharia law. Over time, these regions, like inkblots, would expand and coalesce into a contiguous Muslim empire, or caliphate.
To abet that process, Naji urged jihadists to combat the “deceptive media halo” that the West had supposedly created. “He felt there was this Western narrative, particularly this American narrative, that America is this unconquerable nation that is undivided, undefeated, and can never be thwarted,” says McCants, who translated The Management of Savagery from the original Arabic. “But he argued that if the jihadists had their own media capabilities that were able to provide the ‘truth,’ it would undermine the deceptive media halo.” To that end, Naji advised his readers to study the West’s media so they could understand how best to mimic its methods of persuasion.
After Zarqawi was killed by an American air strike in June 2006, AQI rebranded itself as the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI). The organization was considered a middling menace until it ramped up operations in war-torn Syria in 2013, thereby transforming into the now-familiar ISIS. Under the leadership of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a wily political operator who claims to be a descendant of the prophet Muhammad, ISIS took advantage of Syria’s misery to put Naji’s theories in action: It swept into cities where chaos reigned and brought some semblance of order through a combination of administrative competence and raw brutality. At the same time, ISIS exploited sectarian tensions in Iraq to capture a significant chunk of that country, including the pivotal northern city of Mosul.
The shrewd use of digital media was integral to ISIS’ lightning-fast expansion in 2013 and 2014. The group’s media wing, al-Furqan, documented every aspect of its offensives, paying special attention to the grisly fates of members of the Syrian and Iraqi regimes. The fourth installment of the Clanging of the Swords video series, for example, released in May 2014, plays like a satanic episode of Cops: Videographers with handheld equipment ride along with ISIS death squads as they pursue and assassinate Iraqi security personnel, some of whom are shown begging for their lives. These videos helped persuade police and soldiers in other cities to melt away rather than resist when they heard that ISIS forces were on the march.
As it established the rudiments of a functioning state, ISIS also was building a decentralized media syndicate. Each wilayat, or province, now runs its own media office, staffed by camera operators and editors who churn out localized content from Nigeria to Afghanistan. (In a November 2015 interview with The Washington Post, a former Islamic State camera operator from Morocco claimed he had been paid $700 per month, or seven times more than the typical fighter.) The provincial media offices are also responsible for managing “media points”—kiosks or roving vans that distribute indoctrination materials to the residents of newly conquered cities (usually on USB drives or SIM cards). Since the Islamic State tightly restricts access to the Internet or mobile networks, the group’s audio and video become the only legal digital information in the region.
To persuade foreigners to emigrate to the caliphate, the Islamic State produces—in addition to martyrdom videos—literature and videos that emphasize its alleged utopian aspects, particularly the freedom from any trace of religious persecution. “What they are able to say now is ‘You don’t have to just hold the idea of a caliphate in your mind—this is real, this is tangible, and you can come here and flourish and bring your families,’” says John Horgan, a professor at Georgia State University’s Global Studies Institute and the author of The Psychology of Terrorism. In one 21-minute video entitled Honor Is in Jihad: A Message to the People of the Balkans, a smiling Albanian fighter is shown holding his pigtailed daughter’s hand at an outdoor market that abounds with fruit. He assures his fellow Albanian Muslims that if they come to the caliphate, they will never again have to worry about police “finding your wives uncovered” during midnight raids.
The foreigners who’ve made the trek to the wilayats aren’t necessarily expected to fight; the Islamic State welcomes white-collar workers too. This policy has been a boon to the organization’s media departments, which have grown more sophisticated as they’ve added specialists with experience in the West—men like Ahmad Abousamra, a former Northeastern University computer-science student who became a top figure at the office that specializes in non-Arabic content. (Abousamra is rumored to have been killed last year, though the FBI is still offering a $50,000 reward for his capture.) The influx of talent has brought new levels of polish and creativity to the Islamic State’s media output: GoPro cameras have been affixed to AK-47s and sniper rifles, for example, resulting in first-person scenes that seem plucked from the Call of Duty videogame franchise.
Perhaps most important, this content always places the stories of ordinary fighters front and center—a sharp break from the approach favored by al Qaeda, whose media has typically focused on elite figures like Zawahiri. “They moved the focus from individuals who are patricians to jihadis who speak the street language, the vernacular,” says Brian Michael Jenkins, a terrorism expert at the Rand Corporation. That shift in narrative perspective has put the Islamic State in sync with a generation that is accustomed to creating and sharing its own content. When young viewers check out the Islamic State’s videos, then, they can imagine themselves right there on the screen.
The Islamic State’s media strategy has also taken a cue from the tech world’s affinity for transparency. “In the past, jihadist groups tended to prefer using password-protected Arabic-language forums to share and exchange ideas,” notes Documenting the Virtual Caliphate, the Quilliam Foundation report. The Islamic State, by contrast, encourages adherents to operate on the Internet’s most public networks, having determined that it’s worth sacrificing secrecy in exchange for publicity.
The Twitter user who went by the handle @abuionian was never one to equivocate. A rabid Islamic State supporter who wrote exclusively in slang-inflected English—a clue that he probably did not, as he claimed, live in Baghdad—@abuionian wrote hundreds of posts that seethed with hatred for the West: In just this past December and January alone, he celebrated the deaths of German tourists in an Istanbul bombing, fantasized about making a British journalist his sex slave, and hailed the spread of Lyme disease in the US. He cannot have been too surprised when Twitter suspended his account.
The Islamic State differentiates itself from its terrorist predecessors by virtue of its high-quality media. But that content would still not be so widely distributed via so many different channels were it not for the group’s willingness to crowdsource a great deal of its propaganda chores to total strangers—dedicated fans such as @abuionian.
And @abuionian probably didn’t stay off Twitter long. Jihadist “keyboard warriors” take pride in their ability to return to the service again and again, for that is how they achieve status within their tight-knit community. “These suspensions have become a badge of honor and a means by which an aspirant can bolster his or her legitimacy,” wrote the authors of ISIS in America: From Retweets to Raqqa, a December 2015 report by George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. “In most suspension cases, a new (and often more than one) account with a variation of the previous username is created within hours.” According to Amarnath Amarasingam, a fellow at the Program on Extremism, the Islamic State has taken pains to assure individuals like @abuionian that they will receive divine rewards for their endeavors on Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook—for “hitting the kuffar (unbelievers) where they live.”
The Anatomy of the IS Propaganda Machine
The Islamic State grabs headlines with execution videos, but those gruesome clips make up only a small percentage of the organization’s total media output. —Brendan I. Koerner
Genre: Immigrant Testimonials
Example: Those Who Have Believed and Emigrated
Description: Fighters from every corner of the world tell their stories in their native languages, usually while sitting in bucolic settings. Many speak of how they were not permitted to practice “true Islam” in their home countries. Their children are shown attending schools, playing in gardens, and eating delectable meals.
Genre: Economic News
Example: Food Security: Aspects From the Work of the Agriculture Administration in the Province
Description: Blue-collar workers go about their daily business in a suspiciously cheerful manner: Farmers till crops, bakers roll dough for bread, shopkeepers make change for satisfied customers.
Genre: Battle Porn
Example: Explosives of the Thrones #2
Description: Islamic State soldiers fire mortar rounds and rockets toward unseen enemy positions, as lilting nasheeds (a cappella holy songs) fill the soundtrack. Suicide bombers drive trucks into buildings, and the camera lingers on the resulting plumes of black smoke.
Genre: Valentines to the State
Example: And They Gave Zakah
Description: Merchants and other businessmen interact with the Islamic State’s government employees, like tax collectors and religious police. Everyone pronounces themselves grateful for the order that the Islamic State has instilled.
Genre: Mergers and Acquisitions
Example: Bay’ah to the Caliph of the Muslims Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
Description: Members of terrorist groups from far-flung locales, such as the Philippines or Somalia, pledge their allegiance by reciting an oath to the camera, then giving each other hugs.
The cockroachlike resilience of the Islamic State’s social media cheerleaders has bewildered American law enforcement. At a January summit with representatives from Silicon Valley’s leading companies, Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson implored the assembled executives to devise better methods for sniffing out extremists. “Are there technologies used for the prevention of spam that could be useful?” asked one of the Key Questions items in an agenda obtained by The Intercept. “Or something like Facebook’s suicide process flow?” (a reference to Facebook’s system for identifying users threatening to harm themselves). But even the cleverest algorithms are unlikely to foil the majority of the Islamic State’s online acolytes, who are highly incentivized to route around countermeasures.
The Islamic State has fueled the growth of its social media freelancers by parsing out information in a strategic manner. The group permits select (and presumably trusted) people within the caliphate to form relationships with Western supporters, usually through the messaging apps Telegram or Surespot; the chosen emissaries, in turn, become celebrities in their online circles because they have the inside scoop on the supposed day-to-day realities of life in Raqqa or Mosul. “There are a few supporters who, over time, have demonstrated a kind of access to those inside the Islamic State,” Amarasingam says. “Those are the people who tend to become authoritative and influential, the people who have that kind of access.” These elite users, or “nodes,” as they were termed in the ISIS in America report, suffuse their social media networks with exclusive content, thereby creating buzz—and allowing the Islamic State to maintain a modicum of influence over its crowdsourced partners.
Still, the Islamic State has clearly taken risks by opting for openness. Because its supporters are so visible on social media networks, they often attract law-enforcement scrutiny: A good example is the case of Heather Coffman, a Virginia woman whom the FBI zeroed in on after she made statements like “I love ISIS!” on Facebook. (Coffman, who tried to arrange for a male acquaintance to travel to Syria so he could become an Islamic State martyr, is currently serving a 54-month federal prison sentence.)
But the drawbacks to the Islamic State’s online strategy have been outweighed by the advantages. On the most pragmatic level, social media has lowered the bar of entry for recruits—the curious have no problem finding the Islamic State’s propaganda in numerous languages, and they can easily connect with intermediaries who will facilitate their travel to the caliphate. (Jaelyn Young, a Mississippi college student accused of trying to join the Islamic State, allegedly planned her thwarted trip to Syria by using her @1_modest_woman Twitter account to form one-on-one relationships with fighters’ widows.)
But in a more meta way, the Islamic State’s aggressive approach to social media may be most valuable to the organization as a tool to stoke a particular kind of paranoia in the West: Because we’re already so anxiety-ridden over how Twitter and its cohorts are altering our lives, we’re prone to freak out when sinister entities seem more adept than we are at using the technology. “We’re all just getting used to using social media ourselves, as a society, so we overemphasize the Islamic State’s effectiveness because they use it too,” says Charles Kurzman, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina who studies Islamic terrorism. In classic fashion, the medium has become the message—the mere fact that the Islamic State has infected Twitter, itself one of our chief objects of wonder and mystification, dupes us into giving its brand far too much credit.
The case of Edward Archer may never make much sense. On the night of January 7, while clad in a white robe and white mask, Archer ran up to an occupied police car in West Philadelphia and fired 13 shots from a stolen pistol; the car’s driver was hit three times but survived. At his interrogation, Archer was happy to offer a motive: “I follow Allah and pledge allegiance to the Islamic State, and that is the reason I did what I did.”
It’s possible that Archer had studied the incendiary words of Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, the Islamic State’s official spokesperson, who has urged the group’s sympathizers to kill Western nonbelievers by any means necessary (including by destroying their crops). But a closer look at Archer’s life raises doubts about the depth of his engagement with the Islamic State: His mother claimed that he had been suffering from powerful hallucinations, and he was scheduled to be sentenced on forgery charges just four days after the attack. Individuals in the throes of such personal crises are prone to latch on to whatever bogeyman is preoccupying the American imagination at that moment.
“There are people who, for whatever reason, have some sort of personal difficulty or experience, some sort of break in their lives, and are attuned to engaging in violence,” Kurzman says. “And so they will glom on to whatever the biggest, baddest revolutionary ideology of the moment is.”
That is precisely what happened time and again during America’s skyjacking epidemic, an apt historical parallel to the Islamic State’s current crowdsourcing of violence. Throughout President Richard Nixon’s first term, hijackers seized commercial flights every week or two, often demanding passage to Cuba or six-figure ransoms. (In 1969 alone, there were 38 hijacking attempts in American airspace, including one in which an AWOL marine, Raffaele Minichiello, made it all the way from Los Angeles to Rome aboard a TWA Boeing 707.) The perpetrators of these crimes often said they were acting to support one of the era’s fashionable political causes—the Black Power movement, for example, or the crusade to end the Vietnam War. But if you scratched beneath the surface, you often found people in desperate straits—people like Roger Holder, a PTSD-afflicted Vietnam vet who ostensibly hijacked a Western Airlines jet to Algeria as part of a convoluted plot to win the freedom of American political activist Angela Davis but was also keen to avoid a looming court date for fraud. Or Paul Joseph Cini, an alcoholic loner who claimed to be an affiliate of the Irish Republican Army but who really hijacked Air Canada Flight 812 and demanded a $1.5 million ransom because he was sick of feeling worthless. (“I wanted to stand up and say, ‘Hey, I’m Paul Cini, and I’m here and I exist and I want to be noticed,’” he later explained.)
The Islamic State in the US
As of early March, 84 Americans had been charged with attempting to support the Islamic State in some fashion. Here are profiles of four typical cases. —Brendan I. Koerner
Name: Nicholas Teausant
Date of Arrest: March 17, 2014
Location: Blaine, Washington
A junior-college student who had a brief stint in the National Guard, Teausant pleaded guilty to attempting to travel to Syria to join the Islamic State. He often posted pro-jihadist messages on his Instagram account, which he used as “Assad Teausant bigolsmurf.” He told an FBI informant that he would like to make a video for the Islamic State in which he would be “the one white devil that leaves their face open to the camera.”
Name: Heather Coffman
Date of Arrest: November 17, 2014
Location: Henrico, Virginia
Coffman praised the Islamic State on multiple Facebook accounts, under aliases such as “Heather La’Ahad” and “Ubeida Ametova.” She told an undercover FBI employee that she had tried to arrange for a man she called her husband to travel to Syria, where she wanted him to die a martyr. (They split up before her plan came to fruition.)
Name: Alexander Ciccolo
Date of Arrest: July 4, 2015
Location: Adams, Massachusetts
The son of a Boston police captain, Ciccolo is alleged to have planned to use pressure-cooker bombs and assault rifles to attack taverns and a state university. On his Facebook page, he called himself “Ali Al Amriki” and thanked the Islamic State for killing American soldiers. An FBI affidavit notes that Ciccolo has “a long history of mental illness.”
Name: Harlem Suarez
Date of Arrest: July 27, 2015
Location: Key West, Florida
Suarez’s Facebook account listed his “likes” as “Jihadist” and “Extraordinary Prayer for ISIS.” He was arrested after attempting to buy a bomb from an undercover FBI employee, allegedly so he could attack “cartoons, police, and military.”
Evening newscasts, the cutting-edge media of the late 1960s, played a significant role in the contagiousness of the hijacking epidemic, much in the same way that sleek al-Furqan videos have sparked numerous individuals’ desire to conduct attacks for the Islamic State. When interviewed in prison, many hijackers confessed that they’d become intrigued after viewing news footage of stolen planes; when they committed their own crimes, they were often mindful of the fact that their exploits would be aired to millions. (One man, Ricardo Chavez Ortiz, even requested that news crews come aboard the Frontier Airlines jet that he’d seized so they could live-broadcast his speech about American racism.) The hijackers also gleaned valuable intelligence from coverage of previous incidents, which often led them to modify their plans. When a former Army paratrooper named Richard LaPoint jumped out of Hughes Airwest Flight 800 in January 1972, for example, after having obtained a $50,000 ransom in Reno, Nevada, he did so in stiff cowboy boots; as a result, he sprained an ankle upon landing and was thus easily apprehended in a Colorado wheat field. Future “parajackers” made sure to wear appropriate footwear.
The dozens of Americans who’ve been arrested for allegedly plotting to commit violence for the Islamic State, meanwhile, have often seemed obsessed not only with viewing the organization’s well-made content but also with contributing their own videos to the cause. A Kansan named John T. Booker Jr., for example, who stands accused of planning to open fire on an Army base, was radicalized by the al-Hayat Media Center film Flames of War; prior to his arrest, he recorded a video of his own in which he warned Americans to “get your loved ones out of the military.” And a Florida man named Harlem Suarez is accused of having concocted a script for his pro-Islamic State video, one in which he theatrically vowed to help “raise our black flag on top of your White House.”
Because its violence was confined to specific spaces, the skyjacking epidemic was easy to curtail once there was enough political will to do so: Soon after a trio of hijackers threatened to crash Southern Airways Flight 49 into a nuclear reactor in November 1972, the airlines agreed to make all passengers submit to preflight security checks. (Prior to that, most travelers could waltz onto their planes without passing through metal detectors or having their carry-ons searched.) The still-nascent epidemic of Islamic State-inspired violence presents a trickier challenge, since the vulnerable and angry souls who’ve been triggered by the group’s aura are carrying out their attacks in various locales: at a cartoon contest in Dallas, on a sidewalk in Queens, at a social-services center in San Bernardino.
Since it’s impossible to harden security at every public space in America, law enforcement has focused on arresting suspected Islamic State sympathizers before they can act. They often use paid informants, many of whom are familiar with law enforcement’s modus operandi because they have criminal records themselves. These informants frequently point the FBI in the direction of suspects who suffer from mental illnesses and are thus easy prey for sting operations. The FBI’s repeated targeting of people who clearly require psychiatric care has fed into the Islamic State’s contention that Islam is persecuted in the West. (When @abuionian posted about one such sting on Twitter, he commented, “Racist FBI doing what it does best: framing Muslims/minorities.”)
Because attacks persist despite the FBI’s aggressive use of informants, it is tempting to believe that more draconian measures are in order—say, giving government the means to decrypt Apple’s iPhone software at will. Yet that is precisely what the Islamic State wants us to do, as Abu Bakr Naji outlined in The Management of Savagery. He described the need to manipulate Western nations into committing what he termed “cultural annihilation.” This is a cult that desperately wants us to turn on ourselves.
Midway through last September, terrorism analysts noticed a coordinated shift in the Islamic State’s media output. All at once, the various wilayat media offices released a flood of videos with titles such as Would You Exchange What Is Better for What Is Less? and Muslim Asylum Seekers to the Abode of the Disbelievers, all of which excoriated the refugees who were fleeing Iraq and Syria by the tens of thousands. This propaganda was a clear indication of the Islamic State’s anxiety over the outflow of people from its territories—an anxiety that was underscored in November when the group outfitted one of the suicide bombers who attacked Paris with a fake Syrian passport. The Islamic State wants the Western conversation about refugees to center on whether they’re security risks rather than the fact that they’re living proof of the caliphate’s intrinsic dysfunction. The group has gotten its wish to some extent, which does not speak well for our ability to recognize our adversaries’ intentions.
If the West really wants to destroy the Islamic State’s “deceptive media halo,” we need to take a page from them and foster our own forms of crowdsourced messages. First and foremost, Western nations must focus on broadcasting the stories of refugees, told in their own words—words that would strongly undermine the “remaining and expanding” narrative that is so crucial to the Islamic State’s identity. In the organization’s digital content, the caliphate is depicted as a veritable Eden, a place where placid lakes literally teem with fish and the well-fed children are always smiling. What if we gave refugees the digital tools and Internet access necessary to produce content that not only rebuts those depictions but also conveys the daily horrors of living in a society where callous men of violence run the show? To make this possible, we must guarantee safety for them and their families, for the Islamic State is never shy about exacting retribution against those who reveal its flaws. The US should also give Islamic State defectors, particularly those with American roots, a chance to share their unfiltered tales of disillusionment. As things stand now, those who return from the caliphate are more liable to land in prison than in front of an audience; one Houston-area man, Asher Abid Khan, is facing 30 years behind bars simply for going to Turkey, where he decided to abandon his plan to enter the caliphate and returned home. Instead of treating every returnee like an irredeemable villain, our government should instead encourage them to share their own stories—tales that will not only illuminate the Islamic State’s wickedness but also highlight our own society’s pluralism and mercy. Determining which returnees are truly no longer threats will be tricky, but deradicalization programs in Europe in particular are yielding data that can help us build the right psychological assessment tools.
These authentic stories will always be more powerful than coordinated government efforts. The State Department’s “Think Again, Turn Away” public relations campaign, which has the noble goal of countering the Islamic State’s propaganda, has floundered since its inception because its content is comically stodgy. The campaign is best known for its Twitter account, @thinkagain_DOS, which features GIFs and JPEGs that depict snippets of the Islamic State’s evil—truthful images that fail to resonate because they look like public service posters from the 1980s. No matter how valid the State Department’s message, it cannot expect to win hearts and minds with content that is roundly mocked as amateurish. (A new State Department office, the Global Engagement Center, was recently set up to “counter the destructive messages of violent extremist groups,” though it has so far revealed few specifics about its plans.)
If we’re serious about winning this media game, time is of the essence. To offset some losses in the Middle East, the Islamic State is now moving to strengthen its North African wilayats. The group is already on the verge of turning Libya into its newest stronghold, which is why it’s so important right now to dissuade young men and women around the globe from pledging their futures to the caliphate.At the same time, we must also keep the Islamic State’s menace in perspective, lest we fall into the trap that Naji detailed in The Management of Savagery: The Islamic State can succeed in the long run only if we’re foolish enough to let it terrorize us into abandoning our basic values such as due process and privacy. We must resist the distorting effects of the “media halo” that the Islamic State has built for itself, while never forgetting the considerable power of our own.
Contributing editor Brendan I. Koerner (@brendankoerner) is the author of The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking.
This article appears in the April 2016 issue.
PHOTOGRAPHS: REUTERS (OPENING IMAGE); RICHMOND INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT (POLICE CARS); ILLUSTRATIONS BY 520 DESIGN