ISIS propagandaAs ISIS loses ground in Syria and Iraq, its propaganda output sharply declines
Relentless air and ground attacks by the U.S.-led coalition have been inflicting increasing pain on ISIS – from killing more than 50,000 ISIS fighters, decimating the organization’s leadership, and forcing it to abandon vast swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria. A new study found that another victim of ISIS’s accumulating defeats has been the organization’s vaunted propaganda machine. The Islamist group’s propaganda specialist shave been producing only a small number of videos and images compared to their prodigious output two years ago.
Relentless air and ground attacks by the U.S.-led coalition have been inflicting increasing pain on ISIS – from killing more than 50,000 ISIS fighters, decimating the organization’s leadership, and forcing it to abandon vast swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria. A new study found that another victim of ISIS’s accumulating defeats has been the organization’s vaunted propaganda machine.
The Islamist group’s propaganda specialist shave been producing only a small number of videos and images compared to their prodigious output two years ago.
A study by the West Point Academy found that ISIS’s propaganda output had fallen from a high point of 761 releases a month in August 2015 to just 194 releases a year later.
“It is clear that the organization has been forced to cut back these activities in response to the increasing amount of counter-terrorism pressure brought to bear,” researchers at the Combating Terrorism Center concluded.
The New York Times reports that the West Point study was released as ISIS confirmed that its propaganda chief Abu Mohammad al-Furqan, was killed by an American airstrike last month.
Furqan was behind the group’s most graphic execution videos, including the beheadings of British and American journalists and aid workers.
The report notes that much of the Western attention to ISIS propaganda videos has been focused on the most violent videos, but the West Point study found that more than half of the 9,000 videos, pictures, and tweets produced by ISIS focused on non-violent activities.
Around 52 percent of the group’s propaganda output was dedicated to presenting “everyday life” inside the caliphate, with the propaganda aiming to portray positive image of how ISIS governed the areas under its control and show people leading normal lives, including going swimming and visiting amusement parks.
Only around 9 percent of the organization’s propaganda output included images of graphic violence.
The study says that this emphasis on benign daily life differentiated ISIS propaganda from that of other jihadist groups: the emphasis in most of ISIS propaganda has not been on asking potential recruits to attack targets in the West, but rather on asking new adherents to move to Syria in Iraq and begin new lives with their families in the caliphate.
“Clearly it is trying to portray itself as something more than just a fighting organization,” the study found.
The study notes, however, that ISIS, as it began to lose more and more territory, has cut back on its non-military propaganda.
In the final months of the study, the West Point researchers found that propaganda related to daily life in the caliphate had dwindled to almost nothing, but the group continued to produce propaganda highlighting its armed struggle.
The decline offers evidence that ISIS is “under significant pressure” and struggling to find the manpower and resources to keep up its past rates of propaganda production, the study says.
— Read more in Daniel Milton, Communication Breakdown: Unraveling the Islamic State’s Media Efforts (Combating Terrorism Center, West Point, 10 October 2016)
