Messing with the Enemy

by Clint Watts

  Meanwhile, some respondents choosing an outlying answer defended their assessment in the comment boxes after they answered. “I know everyone is saying . . . but I just don’t agree . . . here’s why.” These forecasters knew they challenged the crowd, and they wanted to defend their reasoning, oftentimes providing a kernel of their background, experience, or skills to justify their alternative thinking. The social engineering challenge worked: foxes emerged on nearly every question.

  I enlisted West Point classmate and former Army colleague John Brennan as a check on my thinking. We had nearly frozen to death together at the U.S. Army Ranger School and had since stayed in touch. A brilliant cadet and a smart intelligence hand, John was as intrigued as I was by why crowds kept missing on predictive bets. We averaged their responses to questions and averaged their attributes, creating four quadrants. Those always picking outlying responses, and with backgrounds far different from the crowd, we labeled “Red Foxes.” They seemed to be contrarians and wildly off most of the time. But those with outlying attributes who only occasionally broke from the norm we dubbed “Brown Foxes,” and they seemed to be onto something. A few financial experts floated into this batch, and they proved adroit at predicting where al-Qaeda’s money flows would go after bin Laden’s demise. Regional experts, meanwhile, more clearly understood how al-Qaeda’s affiliates responded to the boss’s death.

  Most important, I now had several dozen outlying hypotheses indicating where terrorists might go with their hero gone. Social media had brought in terrorist recruits far and wide, but for me, on Twitter, it had helped me narrow the field and pick out the outliers scattered around the world who had unique skills and information enabling them to anticipate where violence would be heading. For each region and terrorist affiliate, I’d tag and track terrorists, journalists, and pundits. I used these signals to understand the jihadi stew boiling and reconstituting as Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s deputy, took command of al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda’s deputies worldwide began plotting, moving, and attacking, and only an outlier here and there, positioned in a far-off land, browsing a jihadi chatroom or a Facebook group—not the bureaucrats and pundits sipping coffee in D.C.—could see what was coming.

  * * *

  Those who believed that bin Laden’s death didn’t matter for al-Qaeda didn’t understand the control he wielded over the group’s affiliates. Riffling through the records stashed in his Abbottabad compound, the U.S. intelligence community had unearthed communications from al-Qaeda affiliates around the world. The ties weren’t always that strong, but jihadi leaders still sought guidance from bin Laden regarding strategy and finances. Osama’s communiqués showed him to be isolated, fearful of drones wiping out his top leaders, and most of all cautious, often restraining the aggression of the younger generation.

  Bin Laden encouraged affiliates to hold off on their plans to create an Islamic caliphate—the ultimate goal of jihadi doctrine, the creation of a new Sharia state mirroring that established by the Prophet Muhammad. With bin Laden gone, al-Qaeda franchises no longer had to wait. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula moved first as al-Qaeda’s senior leadership withered in Pakistan. The Yemeni franchise, powered by the influence of Anwar al-Awlaki’s e-broadcasts and a string of near-miss bombings on Western aviation, had already become the central node for al-Qaeda’s global network. AQAP created a splinter insurgent group called Ansar al-Sharia that sought to build a prototype Islamic mini-state, an emirate, governed by Sharia law. After initially taking ground and instituting their rule, U.S. drones and the Yemeni army fractured this short-lived Islamic emirate. Still, its efforts signaled what was to come.

  Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) soon followed AQAP’s model, teaming with a local Sahelien insurgent force known as Ansar Dine. In early 2012, they pushed the Malian army out of Timbuktu, building, for the moment, the largest geographic Islamic emirate in modern times. AQIM again illustrated extremists’ desire to produce something tangible, to actually achieve the vision of jihad by restoring an Islamic state governed by Sharia law. The French quickly swept through the Sahel in January 2013, ending this nascent dream.17 Even if the Yemeni and French armies hadn’t uprooted these emirates, neither AQAP nor AQIM attracted enough foreign fighters to become a robust jihadi playground. That would soon change.

  Syria had fractured into full military conflict among rebel factions and government loyalists not long after the Arab Spring touched off in 2010. For terrorists on social media, no fight proved more important. A Muslim country, oppressed by a dictator, full of Koranic historical significance, at the intersection of the foreign fighter infiltration routes that had powered al-Qaeda in Iraq only years before, Syria provided all the ingredients for what would become the largest terrorist migration in world history, one amplified and coordinated at light speed on social media.

  Sympathetic Muslim populations from Morocco to the Philippines posted pictures of dead Syrian civilians bombed by President Bashar al-Assad’s war machine. The Free Syrian Army grew quickly, and foreign fighters principally inspired to topple the mad dictator Assad rapidly assembled in Turkey and began pouring over the border into Syria. Each new recruit to the battlefield began snapping selfies showcasing their transition from online supporter to on-the-ground commando. Al-Qaeda’s Iraqi arm, now branded the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), being always better on social media than its peers, recognized the opportunity and dispatched a deputy named Abu Muhammad al-Julani across the Syrian border from Iraq to launch a new affiliate: Jabhat al-Nusra. Soon after, a hooded and masked Julani competed for influence among Syrian factions, and jihadi social media production teams kicked into full gear. Videos of jihadi boys in Syria flooded forums, and officially branded clips employing up-to-date video editing spread virally on Twitter and descended into Facebook feeds around the world. Each retweet and favorite raised awareness of the Syrian slaughter, and foreign fighters descended on Syria in greater numbers and at faster speeds than anything seen in any previous jihadi conflict.

  The sands were shifting inside jihad. As al-Qaeda launched its Syrian arm, Jabhat al-Nusra, the Islamic State of Iraq surged back into the spotlight in 2012. Terrorist veterans and Sunni Iraqi army survivors, captured and detained by American forces, shared cells and yards in places like Camp Bucca, Iraq. Prison breaks and releases after the American withdrawal returned these hardened fighters to the battlefield. Suicide bombings again picked up around Baghdad.

  Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had initially dispatched his deputy, Julani, to form Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria as an under-the-table al-Qaeda franchise seeking to infiltrate the civil war. Baghdadi’s ISI had provided Nusra with men, salaries, supplies, and direction. But the spoils of war, namely oil and foreign fighters, were going to Nusra. Julani sought to report directly to al-Qaeda’s chief, Zawahiri, in Pakistan, rather than to his former commander and middleman Baghdadi in Iraq. The two groups increasingly collided in eastern Syria. On April 9, 2013, Baghdadi made a bold move straight out of Game of Thrones. He announced the absorption of Jabhat al-Nusra into the newly branded Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham—“ISIS”—adding the Arabic name al-Sham to its moniker to signify the group’s expanded kingdom, which sought to include Syria and the greater Levant region. (Note: the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant—“ISIL”—is the same as ISIS, merely substituting Levant as the English equivalent of “al-Sham.”)

  Julani feared he’d lose control of his branch and pledged loyalty to al-Qaeda’s global leader, Zawahiri, the next day. Zawahiri, far removed in Pakistan, attempted to restore order from a distance. The three al-Qaeda leaders squabbled behind the scenes over who was in charge, and of what turf. Zawahiri wanted Iraq to be Baghdadi’s, and Syria Julani’s, with each to report to him directly and independently as an al-Qaeda affiliate. Baghdadi rejected Zawahiri’s guidance creating “fitna”—divisions in al-Qaeda’s ranks—that spilled out into social media. Online rumors and my outlier signals suggested that the schism was real.18 I watched and marked the sides in the Nusra-
versus-ISIS social media debate. Signals showed a major split in al-Qaeda’s global community.

  In August 2013, I drafted a crude map of what I believed were the two competing al-Qaeda networks stemming from Syria. I posted and distributed it on social media.19 Again I waited for the responses and looked for biases from the crowd. With only a couple of exceptions, analysts herded to the status quo response—al-Qaeda was fine, and these squabbles were not sufficient to stop their rise. Some outliers provided refinements and pointed out essential questions I needed to answer to prove my theory that al-Qaeda was fracturing. The terrorists who followed me and some of their supporters were less certain than the American analysts. One jihadi sympathizer, an outlier I’d sensed perused al-Qaeda’s closed forums and networked with real terrorists, suggested I was onto something. He noted dissension in the ranks but couldn’t confirm a complete break.

  Through the fall of 2013, social media postings showcasing ISIS boomed and relative chatter about al-Qaeda and its Syrian affiliate Nusra waned. ISIS became the hashtag of choice on Twitter, and the black flag of ISIS a preferred avatar on Facebook. In every European country, there were Muslim boys creating ever more Facebook groups, where they shared content and connected with their friends on the battlefield. Like other counterterrorism sleuths on the internet, I began compiling lists of recruits to Nusra and the newly named ISIS. A rough estimate showed ISIS gaining recruits at a rate of three or four to every one for Nusra.

  Countries lauded for their Facebook uprisings during the Arab Spring showed alarming terrorist recruitment levels. Tunisia, where the Arab Spring started, showed one of the highest rates of foreign fighter recruitment to Syria. Libyans, free of Qaddafi’s reign, showed up to Syria in droves.

  ISIS inspiration brought recruits like ants to food. One lost Muslim boy would make the jump, travel through Turkey, and begin broadcasting from Aleppo or Idlib. Soon after, two of his closest Facebook friends followed his path. Months later, by the end of 2013, entire European neighborhoods of jihadi boys surfaced in Syria, forming battalions sporting black flags and speaking their native tongues. Foreign fighters on Twitter and Facebook from countries like the United Kingdom and France numbered well into the hundreds by the end of 2013. Nontraditional recruiting grounds—countries like Belgium, Denmark, and the Netherlands—suddenly became hot spots for ISIS to draw manpower from. Arab foreign fighters had ignited the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s and sustained further mobilizations. North Africans had shown up big for al-Qaeda in Iraq during the 2000s, adding to Arab legions. And now, in this third and biggest foreign fighter migration, Europeans, connected on social media, landed in Syria and Iraq in unimaginable numbers.

  In January 2014, al-Qaeda’s civil war began in earnest. Zawahiri rebuked ISIS for its belligerence, announcing that the affiliate was no longer part of the group. His Syrian affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, plotted with other Syrian Islamist groups that launched attacks on ISIS territory in western Syria. Jihadi enthusiasts online didn’t know whom to support, and counterterrorism analysts who’d underestimated ISIS sought to minimize the scale and significance of the infighting. Around the world, al-Qaeda affiliates cautiously watched and younger terrorists began cheering more and more for ISIS, even when veteran ideologues sided with al-Qaeda and Nusra. ISIS bombed old al-Qaeda emissaries deployed in Syria and repelled Islamist groups aligned with Nusra, displaying stronger manpower and ferocity than their challengers.

  I quickly penned an updated analysis and posted some new, crude charts depicting splits in al-Qaeda and ISIS.20 I dropped the charts onto social media in February and waited. Feedback rolled in from those overseas and from experts monitoring different countries and regions. The split was real and growing, according to one of my favorite jihadi social media boys, @ShamiWitness. Each month, I updated my charts, plotting new ISIS affiliates surfacing to challenge local al-Qaeda affiliates. Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen—the list continued to grow. In March 2014, using the wisdom of outliers and their social media updates, I posited that ISIS had already overtaken al-Qaeda as jihad’s global leader.21 More analysts concurred with this estimate than in the summer of 2013, but most still repeated claims that al-Qaeda would reign supreme. Some so vehemently rejected the idea that they challenged my claims in public debates, even as ISIS launched a sneak invasion of Iraq.

  In June 2014, a jihadi army of pickup trucks swept across the desert, taking town after town with little resistance. Entire Iraqi army divisions, equipped and trained by U.S. forces only a few years before, fled from ISIS without firing a shot. Many were hunted down, captured, and executed by vicious jihadi foreign fighters. In a matter of days, ISIS stormed and seized Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city, with no more than a thousand fighters. Saddam loyalists and disenfranchised Sunni tribesmen spurned by Iraq’s Shia-dominated government were among them. Jihadi social media posts went wild promoting ISIS’s advance, drowning out any parallel al-Qaeda discussions.

  Twitter feeds and jihadi Facebook groups erupted with videos in early July 2014. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, dressed in a black robe and turban emblematic of the Prophet Muhammad, ascended the pulpit at the Great Mosque of al-Nuri, in Mosul. Rarely photographed or filmed, Baghdadi broadcast to the world an announcement not heard in centuries. Less than a year after rebuffing al-Qaeda and only months after being disavowed by Zawahiri, he announced the formation of a caliphate: the Islamic State. Stunned and overjoyed, jihadi sympathizers retweeted, shared, and broadcast the triumph.

  ISIS became the Islamic State, and jihadi hopefuls rushed to Syria and Iraq, joining in the vision bin Laden slow-rolled but Baghdadi enacted. As the Islamic State continued to expand and conquer Iraq, its social media capacity grew and was more sophisticated than that of any other terror group that had come before. Its media battalion produced sharp videos replicating the style of video games. Rather than bin Laden’s dull monologues, new Islamic State spots showcased global foreign fighters engaged in firefights on the front lines, killing their adversaries and instituting Sharia law. Islamic State media savants dubbed and translated messaging in dozens of languages, opening their world to new recruits: disenfranchised Muslims on five continents. While combat videos grabbed followers’ attention, footage showing Islamic State governance and daily life provided worldwide jihadi supporters with physical evidence of caliphate achievements never before seen in the modern age. Over the next three years, the Islamic State’s al-Hayat Media Center created and distributed more content than al-Qaeda ever had, and its show was far superior.

  ISIS member and supporter social media accounts on Facebook and Twitter were everywhere numbering in the tens of thousands. They employed hashtags to signal major releases and even paid spammers to send out tweets on their behalf. They launched campaigns on Twitter in concert with distribution on Facebook and on a host of other social media applications. ISIS also upgraded its social media teams by pairing them with hackers, who formed a kind of technical brigade. The technical brigade worked on hacking and information security for the group. Together, the teams found workarounds to avoid Twitter’s shutdowns and maximized support from its online fan base. Social bots promoting ISIS appeared, and ISIS and its supporters worked continuously to avoid Twitter’s controls and account closures.

  Twitter’s closures ultimately became an exhausting battle for ISIS, so the group moved its operations to the social media platform Telegram, whose encryption and more closed network blended the terrorist forums of the old internet with new social media applications. Forced to move beyond standard social media apps, ISIS even tried to develop its own social media platform to communicate with its members and supporters. By 2016, ISIS’s digital connections with its global supporters were powering waves of terrorist attacks in Western countries.22

  When two brothers attacked the offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine, in Paris, in January 2015, killing twelve people, they were tied not to ISIS but to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.23 But AQAP appeared unaware of the attack and took a week to prod
uce a rudimentary video using mainstream news footage to claim credit for the attack. Meanwhile, a second attack later that day by an associate of the two brothers pledged loyalty to ISIS. The Islamic State’s social media army rapidly took credit for and promoted the Hebdo attacks as their own. To common observers on social media, the Charlie Hebdo attack likely appeared the work of ISIS rather than al-Qaeda, though it’s likely that neither group knew of the plot beforehand.

  For al-Qaeda, the internet was its savior, and social media its undoing. Websites and forums sustained bin Laden’s control and influence, propagated his message to key nodes worldwide, and suppressed critics challenging his global view. Social media initially seemed to be the next frontier for al-Qaeda as its Iraq affiliate took to YouTube and rallied a new generation into its ranks. Emerging social media applications opened the doors to the masses, spreading jihad far and wide, and out of al-Qaeda’s reach. Instead of expanding al-Qaeda’s brand, Facebook and Twitter powered competitors, brought in detractors, and unleashed dissenters from jihad’s younger generation.

  Through their base in Peshawar, bin Laden and company established physical connections, cementing trust and loyalty among adherents. The internet provided a medium for reaching thousands of potential recruits but opened the door to law enforcement and intelligence. Trust, faith, and loyalty remained unknown and untested in this new virtual world. Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s deputy and now leader of al-Qaeda, privately worried about social media newcomers in communiqués with the boss toward the end of the decade.