The fifth video broke out of the format, dropping the “Message to America” title. The hostage was Abdul-Rahman Kassig, an American military veteran and a convert to Islam who had been working with aid organizations to assist suffering Syrians.
The fifteen-minute video included revoltingly graphic footage of a mass beheading of captured Syrian soldiers, a sharp contrast to the previous videos that had cut away at the start of the act of violence. The killings were carried out by a number of unmasked European foreign fighters, including from the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, ensuring massive news coverage in multiple countries. It ended with a message from the British executioner and an image of Kassig’s severed head.43
Kassig’s execution was not shown, and he did not deliver a statement. It’s possible he refused to cooperate with the script, or that he was killed through some other happenstance (such as a rescue attempt or an air strike) before he could be executed. In another break from the previous installments, the video did not end with a new threat against a new hostage. The series had concluded, at least temporarily.
If these victims shared any common quality other than the English language and their white faces, it was their uncommon goodness. Each victim had been carrying out work that ultimately helped Syrians suffering in the civil war. The American journalists, James Foley and Steven Sotloff, were among the few who braved the terrible risks of reporting on the ground during the conflict. David Haines and Alan Henning were aid workers selflessly helping Syrians in dire need. Abdul-Rahman Kassig was a former U.S. soldier who had converted to Islam and trained as a medic so that he could minister to gravely injured Syrians. It seemed that no one was safe against the knives of ISIS, no matter how kind or how much they had done for Muslims, no matter if they were Muslims themselves.44
Another Western hostage, British journalist John Cantlie, surfaced in a separate series of video episodes titled “Lend Me Your Ears.” Seated in a room in an orange jumpsuit, Cantlie recited scripted ISIS talking points at length.
The series took an unsettling turn in November, when Cantlie appeared in the role of a “reporter,” in an ISIS video shot on location in Kobane, near the border between Syria and Turkey, where ISIS was battling Kurdish fighters for control of the city.45
The orange jumpsuit had been traded for a black button-down shirt, as Cantlie provided an account of the battles there, which was considerably more favorable to ISIS than the mainstream media’s version of events, which Cantlie derided. The video was considerably more natural than “Lend Me Your Ears” episodes, leading to dark speculation that Cantlie was suffering from brainwashing or Stockholm syndrome—or worse, that he had simply gone over to ISIS.46
The propaganda tsunami continued unabated in other areas as well, as bloody weeks turned into bloody months. It was not unusual to see five or six distinct pieces of ISIS propaganda uploaded to the Internet in a single day. The quality and sheer volume of ISIS messaging dwarfed that of al Qaeda and its affiliates. Releases issued regularly from its regional hubs. Longer videos of varying quality were released, with titles such as “The Flames of War” and “The Resolve of the Defiant,” in a growing number of languages.
New speeches from Adnani and Baghdadi emerged sporadically. Like Ayman al Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden before them, the top leaders of ISIS had operational security concerns that equated visibility with risk. Unlike al Qaeda, however, ISIS had compensated with a stream of content celebrating the lower ranks. Because ISIS operated in the open, compared to its secretive progenitor, it perceived little risk in allowing the rank and file to show their faces and tell their stories.
With so many fighters, it could pick and choose. Adnani was a talented speaker, Baghdadi much less so, but among their soldiers were many charismatic individuals. They might not be qualified to lead, but they could certainly sell.
A constant stream of communication resulted. ISIS was constantly seen to be active and vital, while al Qaeda lurked in silence. The latter’s works, whatever they might be, were carried out in darkness, at a snail’s pace. And some jihadis began to wonder openly on social media if those works even mattered.
Even the content of its infrequent releases paled in comparison to ISIS. An al Qaeda Central effort to create an English-language magazine, Resurgence, had taken months to produce a single issue, and when it arrived, it was 117 pages of dull. “Resurgence is a humble effort to revive the spirit of Jihad in the Muslim Ummah,” an editor’s note read. But the revival had decided months ago that it couldn’t wait for al Qaeda.
As 2014 continued its bloody march, new realities took hold. The United States was committed to a gradually expanding campaign against both ISIS and al Qaeda cells in Syria. And the first wave of shock and horror created by the bloody video beheadings of the summer had slowly hardened into something like resolve, alongside a terrible resignation, a recognition that the ISIS rampage would not shrivel under the first Western assault.
The Islamic State would—for now—remain, and it had placed its unedited and unfiltered message in front of exponentially more people than al Qaeda ever dared dream. Jihadist propaganda had had a history measured in decades, but it had long been obscure and limited to an audience of mostly true believers.
Suddenly, the stuff was everywhere, intruding on the phones, tablets, and computers of ordinary people who were just trying to go about their daily business online.
Although ISIS’s skillful storytelling was an important factor in this process, it was not the entire story. As part of its quest to terrorize the world, ISIS had mastered an arena no terrorist group had conquered before—the burgeoning world of social media.
CHAPTER SIX
JIHAD GOES SOCIAL
How extremists use technology is no great mystery. Any high-tech tool that you use—from a desktop PC to a smartphone—is fair game for extremists, too.1
Unless a terrorist group is ideologically opposed to technology itself, it will generally use every available tool to do its work. Jihadists are no exception. Their morality may be centuries behind the times, but their technical skills expand to fit their available resources.
During the 1980s, jihadists produced propaganda films on videotape and printed sophisticated four-color magazines that were reasonable facsimiles of Time or Newsweek.2 They didn’t distribute them on the Internet. Instead, they went out via mail, or were handed out inside or outside a mosque. In dedicated centers around the world, including in the United States, those who were interested could go to find out more about the movement.
They discussed all this content, not over Facebook, but in person, after viewing a video together in a darkened room; not in YouTube comments, but after listening to an incendiary cleric speak before a roomful of people, everywhere from Cairo, Egypt, to Tucson, Arizona, and most points between.
And as media technology shifted, so did the extremists. Expensive magazines and newsletters with their associated postal costs, such as the Al Hussam (The Sword) newsletter published out of Boston, moved to email (like the Islam Report, out of Florida). These were pragmatic decisions. It cost about $1,000 a month to publish Al Hussam on paper. It cost virtually nothing to email Islam Report.3
Jihadis switched to digital video, around the same time early-adopting consumers did, and for similar reasons. It was cheaper and easier to distribute the same content in a downloadable file than on a videotape or DVD.
Social media wasn’t much different. By 1990, white supremacists were using dial-up bulletin boards to communicate. As chat rooms became popular on services such as Yahoo! and AOL, radical recruiters signed up in droves, making friends and influencing people from a distance. As it became cheaper and easier to set up and maintain topic-centered message boards using software like vBulletin, jihadis and other extremists shifted again, with thousands of users taking to the new format.
After September 11, the message boards became the preferred social networking tool for jihadists. These message boards, more commonly referred to as onl
ine forums or just “the forums,” are Web pages where a user can register, under a real or assumed name, to discuss topics of mutual interest.4
The forums are generally very structured environments, which suited jihadists in the post-9/11 era of justified paranoia about spies and security. Each forum features several major themes for discussion, under which users can start a “thread” on a specific topic of interest. For example, a major theme might be Syria, and a thread might be focused on the latest military action by a specific group.
After a thread starts, other users chime in to post their opinions. Users can reply to specific posts or simply type into the thread directly. Popular or controversial threads can grow to include hundreds of posts, but most peter out after a couple dozen.
The forums also have clear hierarchies. At the top is the person who owns the forum—the person or group that registered the forum’s Internet domain name and has de facto control over the technical aspects of the site. The owner generally has the power to delete the entire message board, delete individual threads and content, accept new users, and ban or assign authority to existing users.
Beneath the owners are the administrators, also called moderators. Administrators have most of the powers of the owner, except for the ability to completely delete the forum, but they can be overruled by the owner. Administrators usually have their own hierarchy as well, with a small number in charge of the big picture, and a larger number of deputies to keep up with all the activity.
The general membership of the forum also has tiers of membership, which are indicated in users’ profiles and also usually displayed next to their usernames when they post. Tiers can be based on different factors. Some forums allow users to score points based on popularity. Others allow advancement based on the number of posts by a user, or how long they have been on the board. Some accord special status to users who financially contribute to the forum’s upkeep.
Most of the perks for advancing up the ladder are purely ornamental—social status and bragging rights, as well as adding a competitive element that motivates members to be active rather than passive.5
But extremist forums also have inner circles. Some topic areas are restricted to trusted members, who are involved in the offline work of terrorist groups, whether planning attacks or coordinating media releases. The forum’s owners and administrators can designate users for special access, or they can restrict sets of ordinary users from routine access if they have concerns about security.6
At the highest levels, the forums have reportedly been used for direct communication among important offline jihadi leaders. In 2013, a virtual “conference call” among jihadi leaders around the world took place within a closed section of an al Qaeda–linked forum to discuss an allegedly impending terrorist attack, although shifting language in media reports about the event left many questions about exactly what transpired.7 It never became clear exactly what the plan was and how close it ever came to execution.
In a letter captured during the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, American al Qaeda spokesman Adam Gadahn complained bitterly about the content of the forums, suggesting the terror group’s control of the forums was considerably less than perfect.8
The highly regimented forum system allows for a great deal of control, if not from al Qaeda itself then from its partisan moderators, but it can also stifle dissent and create resentment for those who feel excluded from the ranks of the elite. In addition to these internal social pressures (see Chapter 3), the forums were highly vulnerable to attack by hostile intelligence services, which could penetrate them for surveillance, or knock them offline entirely when it was convenient.9
In part because of these pressures, but mostly because terrorists follow the same technological trends that everyone else does, jihadist supporters began in recent years to filter out of the forums and start accounts on open social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.
An early adopter on the open social media side was Yemeni-American jihadist cleric Anwar Awlaki. Born in New Mexico and raised largely in Yemen, Awlaki had returned to the United States to study engineering, but soon felt a call to Islamic ministry. His English was perfect, but more important, he was an eloquent, passionate, masterful storyteller.10
Through a combination of communication savvy and his careful cultivation of an ambiguous relationship to terrorism over the course of many years, Awlaki established himself on social media years before the broader jihadist community made the transition.11 He maintained a Facebook page and an active blog, where he communicated with readers in the comments section. Any given posting could prompt hundreds of responses.12
But YouTube was the social platform where Awlaki’s videos achieved notoriety and elevated the issue of terrorist social media to the attention of the public and policy makers.
During his early career, Awlaki was a rising star in the world of mainstream American Muslims, keeping his dark side carefully hidden. While he successfully presented himself as a voice of moderate Islam, he secretly met with al Qaeda operatives and other radicals. Prior to September 11, he had been investigated for possible links to terrorism, and in the months preceding the attacks, he met with some of the hijackers in both San Diego and Falls Church, Virginia. His dark side was not confined to terrorism. San Diego police and later the FBI Washington Field Office investigated his patronage of prostitutes, including minors.13
But to the outside world, for a long time, he was simply an inspiring speaker. He had recorded dozens of lectures, some hours long, on a variety of religious topics. Few of his talks openly discussed radical Islamic concepts, but many contained elements that could be leveraged in that direction. Initially, his lectures were distributed on more than fifty CDs, but as more and more media moved online, they migrated to YouTube.14
Although YouTube has many social features, it is at heart a content delivery system. A wide variety of terrorist groups had been using YouTube to post and distribute propaganda. The conversation focused on reach—how easy it was to find and share terrorist videos and how many people were watching.
After years of pressure from politicians, particularly U.S. senator Joe Lieberman,15 YouTube added an option for users to flag terrorist content.16 If a review by the company found that a video “depicted gratuitous violence, advocated violence, or used hate speech” it would be removed. If not, YouTube would continue to defend “everyone’s right to express unpopular points of view” and “allow our users to view all acceptable content and make up their own minds.”17
But Awlaki’s lectures didn’t easily fit into the box. His material was wildly popular, and not just with terrorists. His spoken lectures routinely racked up hundreds of thousands of hits. By 2010, his content could be divided into three general content categories: early period, not especially radical; early to middle period, not unambiguously radical; and late period, very radical to openly terrorist.
As the cleric became more overtly associated with terrorism, the staggering amount of his content on YouTube presented a dilemma. Should the service remove lectures that were not obviously radical just because the lecturer had graduated to the most-wanted list? What if the lecture was overtly radical and anti-American, but did not openly advocate violence? What if they advocated generally for military jihad but not for specific acts of violence?
YouTube—with its roots as a fun-loving amateur video-sharing service—was ill-equipped to deal with this question. Its parent company, Google, ran a search engine that was arguably the single most powerful tool on the planet for driving Internet traffic, and the technology giant also owned a popular service to publish and host blogs, which was used by all manner of extremists. To take on the role of “values police” opened many cans of wriggling worms.18
Awlaki was not a static target. Increasingly, his name was associated with more than words. The cleric had exchanged emails with Fort Hood army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan, who killed thirteen people in a 2009 shooting spree on the base.19 Later that year, a
l Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) unsuccessfully attempted to bomb a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day. Awlaki had not only inspired the would-be bomber but had met with him at a terrorist training camp.20 In 2010, AQAP tried to detonate two cleverly disguised bombs, again unsuccessfully, on a UPS cargo plane. Awlaki’s involvement was broadly telegraphed in the pages of the terrorist group’s English-language magazine, Inspire.21
At last, YouTube gave in and announced it would more robustly remove Awlaki’s content from its website, although his earlier nonviolent material was allowed to remain. It also announced it would ban accounts owned by government-designated foreign terrorist organizations, or used to support them.22
It was the dawn of a new age in which global corporations would imagine themselves as platforms for the ideal of free speech, only to be dragged kicking and screaming into a role brokering which values would be acceptable and which would not.
The problem was not unique to terrorism. For instance, YouTube had quickly devised algorithms to block pornography and then implemented even more stringent digital fingerprinting techniques to not only block child pornography but report those who posted it to the police, a practice soon adopted by other online providers.23 And an army of lawyers convinced it to swiftly and aggressively address copyright violations.
Terrorism presented a particularly sticky dilemma. Terrorism was not only an inherently political activity, but it was one for which no consensus definition existed. Countries like Bahrain or Egypt might define terrorism very broadly, for instance, to include some legitimate political dissenters (as well as undisputed terrorists), and sometimes even experts on regional politics couldn’t say for certain which was which. Angry activists, on the other hand, accused countries from Israel to the United States to Russia of perpetrating terrorism themselves through military actions and policies.
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