by Nick Miriello and Kathleen Caulderwood, VICE News
If you want to know how the Islamic State group is doing, you
don’t have to follow the Mosul offensive. Just take a look at the recent output of the terrorist
organization’s propaganda machine. A 34-minute audio recording from Islamic State leader Abu
Bakr al-Baghdadi released Thursday — the first message
from Baghdadi in nearly a year — emphasized
violence and war, themes that have become increasingly
common in the group’s messages as its attempts at
statehood falter.
From its very inception, IS has built its legend through
its robust propaganda arm. But as the terrorist group loses
ground on its caliphate (its interpretation of an Islamic state)
and the territory in Iraq and Syria it spent the last two years
conquering, IS is running out of clear, tangible successes to
promote. The once-feared propaganda operation has suffered as a
result, showing a dramatic dip in production and a telling shift
in content since January, according to two recent analyses by
U.S. counterterrorism researchers
.
“Statehood is essential to the IS brand,” said Mara Revkin,
a resident fellow at Yale Law School’s Center for the Study of
Islamic Law and Civilization who studies Islamic legal systems
and governance by militant groups. “But as IS prepares to lose
Mosul, the question is whether this brand will remain attractive
to potential recruits and financiers now that the group has
failed to live up to its slogan of ‘remaining and
expanding.’”
A study published in early
October by the Combating Terrorism Center
at West Point gives some insight into how these ground losses
have already affected IS propaganda exercises. Researchers
focused on “official” visual media produced by IS and distributed
through its official online channels since
January 2015, analyzing roughly 9,000 images and videos. What
they observed in that period paints a stark decline for the once
expanding caliphate.
In raw numbers, the report charted a significant
year-over-year decline to 194 posts in August from the robust
propaganda machine’s peak the year before, when it released more
than 700 posts through its
official media
channels
. Overall output since January has trended
down, coinciding with a 16 percent territory loss over the same
period, according to an October
report published
by
I
HS Conflict
Monitor
, a London-based research firm.
Increased efforts from Twitter and other social media
networks to
restrict and remove the
flow
of IS propaganda likely contributed to
the significant dip in releases, but the CTC study suggested
greater advancements were still needed to counteract the group’s
efforts.
“The caliphate is in many respects getting weaker and [is]
under severe pressure,” Dan Milton, director of research at the
CTC and the study’s author, said. “This pressure and reduced
amount of resources has led to less ability to govern the way
that they would like to govern.”
Military-oriented videos have been the bedrock of IS
propaganda, but the group’s ability to govern once featured
heavily as well — on average accounting for one-fifth of the
media analyzed by Milton and a quarter of IS videos reviewed in
separate research by Javier Lesaca, an analyst at
the
Counter Extremism
Project
.
The caliphate was the group’s signature accomplishment,
simultaneously presenting the clearest vision of its nation-state
ambitions while providing sharp differentiation from its more
shadowy and amorphous forefather, al Qaeda, which had failed to
establish a state itself.
At the height of its production, in the summer of 2015, IS
had established the infrastructure for an advanced propaganda
machine that comprised six central media production and
distribution outlets and 33 regional bureaus. But it wasn’t
simply the group’s ability to produce a wealth of content that
factored into its growth. As Milton writes in his study, the
propaganda’s “diverse array of themes” offer a “likely
explanation” for its “ability to attract such a diverse group of
fighters and supporters from around the world.”
Lesaca identified four central themes in IS video
propaganda: interviews with terrorists, success in battle, good
governance, and theatrical violence. (The CTC study identified
similar themes across the group’s media propaganda, plus two
more: “commercial” and “lifestyle.”)
Theatrical violence may be the theme associated with IS in
the minds of most readers, thanks in large part to the infamous
video of the 2014 execution of journalist James Foley, which
doubled as the group’s entrée to the world outside of Syria and
Iraq. But Lesaca found it accounted for a smaller share of the
group’s video output from January 2014 to September 2016, only 15
percent on average. In fact, good governance and interviews with
IS militants accounted for more than half of the group’s videos
on average, his research found.
The CTC study uncovered similar trends. Many of the group’s
videos and other visual media depicted soldiers holding hands
with children, friends swimming together in a river, or men
preaching the greatness of IS philosophy before huddled masses.
Much in the way a vacation ad for Disney World appears like a
great idea at 1 a.m. on Sunday to worn-out young parents, these
videos were meant to seduce disenfranchised young men and women
searching for an alternative. Put simply, IS was selling
something greater than a brand of terror; it was selling the
appearance of a functional and thriving
nation-state.
As the U.S.–backed Iraqi and Kurdish peshmerga coalition
encircle the IS stronghold city of Mosul — where the group’s
leader first announced the caliphate — and as it loses symbolic
territory like Dabiq, the town where IS prophecy holds an
apocalyptic battle will take place, IS’ key message of governance
increasingly rings hollow. As a result, its once utopian vision,
however manufactured, has trended back toward the
apocalyptic.
Lesaca’s research noted a move away from narratives of
hopeful state-building and governance to the more sensational
scenes of
war and sadism
for which the
group first drew global attention. Battlefield and execution
scenes accounted for 18 of the 24 videos IS released in August
and 12 of the 20 it put out in September.
“September saw one of the highest ever amount of on-camera
execution videos by ISIS since it started this macabre practice,”
said Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, a researcher at George
Washington University’s Program on Extremism. “So it certainly
does appear that the focus has shifted to more violent, militant
imagery.”
Lesaca said the group is simply getting practical. “They
need to keep doing propaganda, but they only have resources to do
what they’re doing,” he said.
IS released only nine videos in October, Lesaca said, seven
of which comprised scenes of battles or executions. The recent
territorial setbacks have prompted experts and military personnel
to undertake the intellectual exercise of exploring
what
IS propaganda might look like
post-caliphate
.
“ISIS attracts recruits through positive messaging about
defending its existence,” Meleagrou-Hitchens said. “If it loses
the ability to make these claims in the future, the effectiveness
of its messaging will likely be severely weakened.”
But Milton cautions those eager to advertise the group’s
total demise. “Although the propaganda has declined as of late,
the Islamic State is still a potent player on the ground and in
cyberspace,” he said.
IS is already attempting to put forth a digital narrative
that is durable enough to withstand its losses on the ground.
“They’re preparing for defeat in Mosul and Raqqa,” Scott Atran,
senior research fellow at Oxford University, said. He cited
recent shifting propaganda that presents current ground defeats
as “temporary” while bolstering the belief that the caliphate
will survive “in the hearts of the coming
generation.”
Revkin made a similar, if more skeptical, observation: “Its
media apparatus does not depend on territorial control, and IS
propagandists are already trying to spin recent and future
military losses as merely a temporary retreat on the path to
eventual victory.”
But she questioned the group’s ability to continue courting
new recruits and retain existing ones amid a withering and
potentially “stateless” caliphate, especially as alternate,
strengthening terror groups like Jabhat Fateh al-Sham in Syria
and the Taliban in Afghanistan capture new territory. Revkin
relayed a recent conversation she had with a former IS member in
Turkey who was planning to join JFS. “It’s the new IS,” he told
her.
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