Media Persuasion in the Islamic State

Neil Krishan Aggarwal

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780231544122
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Since the declaration of the War on Terror in 2001, militant groups such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State have used the Internet to disseminate their message and persuade people to violence. While many books have studied their operational strategies and battlefield tactics, Media Persuasion in the Islamic State is the first to analyze the culture and psychology of militant persuasion.

Drawing upon decades of research in cultural psychiatry, cultural psychology, and psychiatric anthropology, Neil Krishan Aggarwal investigates how the Islamic State has convinced people to engage in violence since its founding in 2003. Through analysis of hundreds of articles, speeches, videos, songs, and bureaucratic documents in English and Arabic, the book traces how the jihadist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi created a new culture and psychology, one that would pit Sunni Muslims against all others after the U.S.-led invasion. Aggarwal tracks how Osama bin Laden and al-Zarqawi disagreed over the goal of militancy in jihad before reaching a détente in 2004 and how al-Qaeda in Iraq merged with five other groups to diffuse its militant cultural identity in 2006 before taking advantage of the Syrian civil war to emerge as the Islamic State. Aggarwal offers a definitive analysis of how culture is created, debated, and disseminated within militant organizations like the Islamic State. Psychiatrists, psychologists, and area-studies experts will find a comprehensive, systematic method for analyzing culture and psychology so they can partner with political scientists, policy makers, and counterterrorism experts in crafting counter-messaging strategies against militants.

ONE

Studying Islamic State Discourse as Mediated Disorder

A HANDSOME soldier in fatigues sings into the camera. His voice is bold, unpolished: He shakes his head to convey the intensity of his emotion rather than modulate his rhythm or volume as a more seasoned singer would. Were it not for his black shirt, his mahogany skin would blend into Iraq’s desert landscape. His scraggly hair connects to his unkempt beard. He looks to be in his twenties. He sits with two others dressed in fatigues. Their raw vulnerability—a band of brothers singing at leisure to escape the interminable destruction of a war that has lasted more than a decade—contrasts with images of troops atop armed vehicles before and after this shot.

They sing the refrain, a single word repeated four times:

Jundullah. Jundullah. Jundullah. Jundullah.

Soldier of God.

A caption identifies the handsome soldier as Abu Talha Al-Yamani. The location: west of the city Samarra in Salahuddin province in Iraq. The camera pans to an armed convoy of men smiling, raising their right index fingers to heaven, driving slowly so the camera can record their exaltation in these moments free from battle. Abu Talha sings the next verse: “We will never swerve from the course of faith. Our path is the straight path from the Quran’s guidance.” The English doesn’t capture the beauty of the original Arabic: The assonance of “a” sounds alternate with the clear consonance of “n” sounds in the first three lines.

A	ba	dan	la	na	na	hīd	(1)
A	ba	dan	la	na	na	hīd	(2)
A	na	khu	ta	ti	ma	ni	(3)
Dar	bu	na	dar	bul	qa	wīm	(4)
Dar	bu	na	dar	bul	qa	wīm	(5)
Mi	nal	hu	dal	qu	ra	ni	(6)

Short verses in easy Arabic that even I, a non-native speaker, can learn. But easy does not mean simple: The lines are crafted in strict meter with two iambic feet (la-na na-hīd) marching closely behind one anapest foot (a-ba-da). Poetic discipline mirrors military discipline.

Abu Talha sings a second verse, pointing to the sky and smiling: “The martyr goes to the paradise of God from His path without ever swerving.” As he sings, a new image flashes on screen. A bloodied body.

The juxtaposition of the soldier’s voice singing with the image of the corpse is jarring. Is this Abu Talha? Are his comrades OK? What has happened to Abu Talha’s family and friends? Do they know he may be dead?

Then the chain of thoughts begins. Abu Talha was just starting his life. He looks like me. Why are we, America, still bombing innocent children in Iraq? I hate to say it, but they have a point. We’ve been there forever and call such deaths “collateral damage.” A life on the path of God, full of conviction, surrounded by comrades in arms, fighting tyranny in self-defense, free from the encumbrances of demanding relationships and the hyper-connected modern world. Like Abu Talha, my life could be celebrated after my death, filmed for eternity.

Hours later, I’m walking with my family at Chelsea Piers in Manhattan. It’s a Saturday afternoon. My children ride the carousel, and as a cool breeze envelops us, I think back to the men on their trucks who smile, point to heaven, and embrace martyrdom. For hours, I feel this psychological dissociation, physically present with my family but distraught over Abu Talha’s fate. Jundullah, I hum to myself. Jundullah. I know the lyrics now; I’ve heard them dozens of times. I mull over what might be the morality of this situation. Should witnessing Abu Talha’s death, a point in life that we normally share only with our most loved ones, commit me to some sort of action? My life in New York feels insignificant and meaningless.

The cognitive dissonance alarms me. I would never pick up a gun and go abroad to fight for a group that has enslaved thousands of women and children (Callimachi 2015a), destroyed priceless antiquities (Stack 2015), and captured an area the size of Jordan (Chulov and Borger 2015). At one point, it ruled over four million people and a third of the territory in Iraq and Syria, earning millions of dollars from smuggling oil on the world market (Sprusansky 2014). And yet, I suddenly appreciate the motivations to do so. I process this contradiction. Through its beautiful bellicosity, the video appeals to my emotional self. Maybe it was the hours of videos I had watched beforehand that primed me for this moment. Maybe it was the grueling monotony of raising very young children. I—a Hindu-American cultural psychiatrist, an infidel whose beheading the Islamic State (IS) would undoubtedly love to film, a scholar who has written extensively against terrorism—have my first bitter taste of radicalization.

If IS’s media elicits these reactions within me, what about its sympathizers? Why is its media so seductive? Finding answers to these questions is crucial given the high stakes involved: The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan alone have cost the American economy more than $3 trillion (Stiglitz and Bilmes 2008). As of this writing, conflicts with IS have produced more than 220,000 Iraqi and five million Syrian refugees, as well as more than three million Iraqi and six million Syrian internally displaced persons (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees 2017a, 2017b). The U.S. Department of State (2015) estimated in February 2015 that more than twenty thousand foreign fighters from one hundred countries had migrated to Syria and Iraq to join groups like IS. What can cultural psychology and psychiatry bring to this discussion that advances the goals of counterterrorism?

The Need to Understand the Psychology Behind Militant Media

I have written this book to analyze the psychological mechanisms of media persuasion and the cultural identity of IS and its precursors. In my earlier books, I justified the analysis of militant media by invoking the American government’s restrictions on travel to the Middle East and communicating with militants. I maintained that such restrictions only drive our need for independent scholarship and that texts on the internet are legitimate primary sources for bypassing these restrictions. Throughout this book, I use text to mean “any configuration of signs that is coherently interpretable by some community of users,” including written, audio, and visual media (Hanks 1989, 95).

My defensive posture in favor of textual analysis has changed since I began writing this book. We now know of numerous attacks in which the video and audio lectures of Anwar Al-Awlaki, Al Qaeda’s English-speaking Yemeni-American ideologue, have been implicated: Nidal Malik Hasan’s shooting in Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009; Faisal Shehzad’s failed Times Square attack in 2010; the Tsarnaev brothers’ bombing of the Boston Marathon in 2013; Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik’s shooting in San Bernardino, California, in 2015; and Omar Mateen’s shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in 2016 (Conway 2012; Shane 2016). We also know that, through its online media, IS has inspired attackers around the world previously thought to be “lone wolves” not under any organization’s command structure (Callimachi 2017), pushing the U.S. government to disrupt IS’s online presence (Sanger and Schmitt 2017). The War on Terror has inspired new forms of cultural media that intersperse reality and fantasy, as militants spread fear by filming deaths and invite others to join in the killing as if they were playing group video games (Aretxaga 2002; Al-Rawi, 2018). This raises essential questions for me as a cultural psychiatrist: Why is militant media so successful at inspiring violence? What kinds of cognitive reaction do militants want to trigger? How can we develop tools to analyze the media of militant groups in general?

If we needed further justifications for studying online media, we now have rigorous research that verifies the importance of analyzing militant texts. In an exhaustive review of 298 studies comparing the beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors of participants exposed to certain types of narrative versus participants not exposed to those narratives, Kurt Braddock and James Dillard (2016) found that (1) narratives could be reliably characterized as cohesive, causal sequences of events based on the purposeful actions of characters; (2) the beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors of the people in the studies who had been exposed to the media in question started to align with the messages of the narratives; and (3) the participants in the studies were affected irrespective of the form of the narrative, whether a written document or audiovisual film. This landmark study verifies the importance of studying militant communication. The question now is this: How does such messaging work?

Kurt Braddock and John Horgan (2016) have argued that militant narratives induce certain psychological mechanisms that should inform our process of constructing counter-narratives. For example, Abu Talha is a parasocial character, a human who appears in the media (like celebrities, athletes, and other public figures) to whom a media consumer responds as if they were in a typical social relationship (Giles 2002). We know that when individuals develop attachments to parasocial characters and perceive similarities with them, they can forge relationships at a distance and feel transported into their world (Brown 2015). I admired Abu Talha’s bravery and perceived a physical similarity with him, and these factors transported me into his world. I was shocked, even saddened, at his death. This inculcation of emotion, I contend, is one way that IS persuades recruits. I wrote a book on the Taliban’s texts (Aggarwal 2016) and never felt attached to its characters even though it produced videos in languages I speak natively. IS media is persuasive in a different way. What can a sustained engagement with the group’s media teach us about its multifaceted approach to language and persuasion?

In the great works on IS published so far, none has placed the group’s media front and center to analyze the cultural and psychological processes of its changing discourse. To take a few examples, Abdel Bari Atwan (2015) and Jessica Stern and J. M. Berger (2015) have covered the group’s online activities but did not isolate the specific psychological mechanisms of persuasion through which IS media inspires attacks. Atwan (2015) writes of IS’s English-language periodical: “Issue four of Dabiq called on Western followers to attack in the West. Almost immediately, in May 2014, twenty-nine-year-old Mehdi Nemmouche opened fire on visitors to the Jewish museum in Brussels, Belgium, killing three” (189). The cultural psychiatrist wants to know what about this particular media is so persuasive in inciting violence. Similarly, William McCants (2015), Brian Fishman (2016), and Fawaz Gerges (2016) have examined aspects of the group’s evolution but have not focused on its changing media discourses throughout history to incite violent thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, which prove its capacity to adapt and refine its persuasion strategies. Finally, and perhaps most foreign to scholars outside the field of mental health, none of these studies has related shifts in the group’s cultural identity to the psychological processes involved in persuasive messaging. These are not criticisms: No author can cover all aspects of a complex phenomenon like terrorism. Instead, it points to the potential academic and policy contributions that cultural psychiatrists can make to a science of militant persuasion, messaging, and counter-messaging through a systematic analysis of these variables.

Patrick Cockburn’s (2015) passage in the epigraph reminds us that IS has disseminated narratives to attract recruits though the internet, thus circumventing Iraqi and Syrian state controls on information. IS challenges claims of governance made by the Iraqi and Syrian governments: As an extralegal organization with territorial control that competes with nation-states (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006), IS markets itself as a provider of protection, dispenser of justice, and fashioner of a new social order based on its interpretations of Islamic law. Its competition with the Iraqi and Syrian governments is evident in bureaucratic texts related to governance and administration. Throughout its manifestations, the group has propagated messages of violence to change the thoughts, emotions, and behaviors—that is, the psychology—of people. What’s going on culturally and psychologically in these texts such that people respond violently? We don’t have to agree with messaging, but we must take these texts seriously if we want policy-relevant research. This is a pressing need since many have ridiculed the U.S. Department of State’s counter-messaging as sarcastic and ineffective. Videos that warned would-be militants that joining ISIS would get them killed backfired when such promises were instead perceived as guarantees of martyrdom (Cooper 2016). Hundreds of Muslim scholars and thought leaders have denounced IS as completely unrepresentative of their faith (“Open Letter to Dr. Ibrahim Awwad Al-Badri, Alias ‘Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi’” 2014), but that has not stopped IS’s recruitment efforts, media production, or attacks around the world. We need to combat the group’s ideas, which is possible only through a deep, longitudinal involvement with its texts.

The Islamic State as Mediating Disorder

The volume of IS media output is overwhelming: The terrorism researcher Aaron Zelin (2015) discovered that IS once disseminated 123 media releases in just seven days, all in Arabic. The second most used language was English, with 8 releases (6.5 percent). Pictures constituted 63 percent of the content (77 releases), followed by videos at about 20 percent (24 releases) and written texts from periodicals such as the English-language Dabiq at about 5 percent (6 releases). An analysis of 1.5 million tweets from Syria in 2012 and 2013 during the civil war showed that secular revolutionaries and moderates posted more content than violent Islamists, though IS supporters posted the most Islamist content (O’Callaghan et al. 2014). Slick videos, images from flying drones, and messages posted in many different languages have motivated militants to migrate to IS’s territories and expand its caliphate (Shane and Hubbard 2014). IS’s online posters respond quickly to developments abroad, especially American policies on Iraq, through dozens of statements each month (Kimmage and Ridolfo 2007). Rapid sharing across Twitter and Instagram networks spread IS’s apocalyptic worldview (Berger 2015a), and the disproportionate ratio of audiovisual to literary texts is intended to recruit a new generation of millennial youth who watch, rather than read, texts (Gates and Podder 2015). IS has created a social media application called “The Dawn of Good Tidings” to retweet hashtags on Twitter, and its followers have mastered “Twitter storms” for publicity (Farwell 2014; Stern an...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Studying Islamic State Discourse as Mediated Disorder
• 2. The Organization of Monotheism and Jihad: Constructing a Militant Cultural Identity
• 3. Al Qaeda in Iraq: OMJ, Al Qaeda, and Militant Acculturation
• 4. The Assembly of the Mujahideen Council: Common Group Identity Formation
• 5. The Islamic State of Iraq, 2006–2013: A Shift in Militant Identity
• 6. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria: Militant Cultural Diffusion
• 7. The Islamic State: The Transmission of Militancy in Families
• 8. Toward a Science, Policy, and Practice of Militant Counter-Messaging
• Notes
• References
• Index