Time to also firebomb IS on internet

IS is losing fighters on the ground, only to recruit more online. The world must also end this virtual power-grab if it is to win the war against the jihadists, writes Rita Katz

US president Barack Obama has pledged to destroy Islamic State (IS) and ensure fighters “find no safe haven”.

However, even as US-led airstrikes are under way in Iraq and Syria, it is clear that bombs alone will not suffice, because IS hides out in the most perfect haven: The internet.

In June, the militant group that Obama refers to as Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, or Isil, grabbed the world’s attention after it took over much of northern Iraq in roughly four days. IS accomplished this by building a massive, sophisticated virtual network of fighters in addition to those on the ground. Indeed, its expansion online has been as swift as its territorial gains. It is this virtual power grab that will be most difficult to combat. The internet has largely sustained the jihadist movement since 9/11. With this powerful tool, jihadists coordinate actions, share information, recruit new members and propagate their ideology. Until the rise of IS, extremist activity and exchanges online usually took place inside restricted, password-protected jihadist forums.

However, IS brought online jihadism out of the shadows and into the mainstream, using social media — especially Twitter — to issue rapid updates on its successes to a theoretically-unlimited audience.

In the same way that IS’s land grab proved stunning, the group’s actions online have been deeply troubling. Up until a recent crackdown by Twitter, IS’s presence on the site had grown tremendously to a well-organised network with dozens of accounts.

For example, Al-Hayat Media Centre, the group’s primary Western-aimed media producer and distributor, was using the micro-blogging site to tweet jihadist material, including magazines, Islamic chants, e-books, leadership messages and calls to join the group. It also sent high-definition videos in Arabic, English, Bosnian, German, French, Russian, Indonesian and other languages. In addition, IS had been openly running local Twitter accounts, designated for specific cities and regions in Iraq and Syria. These provided news updates and martyr profiles, all geared to win the hearts and minds of local Sunnis.

Yet, it was not just the official IS media accounts that were worrisome. With the widespread adoption of social media and smartphones, individual fighters were turning their fierce military battles into real-time, glorifying accounts for potential jihadists around the world.

These self-styled social-media personalities used online platforms to interact with prospective recruits in their own languages, boasting of their “heroic” exploits and desires for martyrdom.

IS clearly sees Twitter as crucial to its survival. So it is unlikely to be chased off the platform without a fight. When Twitter cracked down on IS-related accounts, the militants ignited a massive anti-Twitter campaign, filled with death threats against the company and its employees. The scare campaign even used its own hashtags, such as #Thought_of_a_Lone_Lion, which accompanied calls for individual attacks.

It didn’t end there. A few days later, IS demonstrated that it can beat Twitter in its battle to silence the group’s propaganda machine. After Twitter suspended the IS accounts, the militants still managed to tweet the beheading video of the British aid worker David Haines on Sept 13. The group used a carefully-calculated manoeuvre on private account settings.

Soon after, links to the beheading flooded Twitter feeds everywhere. This continues today. The fact that the latest beheading video of a French hostage, released last week by an IS-inspired group in Algeria, was distributed on Twitter demonstrates that the site remains the primary outlet for propaganda from Islamic State and its supporters.

The group’s message is clear: You can’t stop us.

As the West continuous to mishandle the electronic jihad, it is proving the militants right. Consider the State Department’s ‘Think Again Turn Away’ social- media campaign. In trying to win over would-be jihadists online, the programme engages in childish discussions with jihadists.

Some have compared this to “trolling” and it has proved not only to be ineffective, but counter-productive. “It is a silly game,” said a former State Department official involved in countering Islamic propaganda online.

IS is a new kind of enemy. Fighters killed in bombing raids can be easily replaced by new recruits found online. To fully end this cycle, the online recruitment of extremists must stop. Without excising the source of the problem, Washington and its allies will not succeed.

In Iraq and Syria now, the US is not using “silly games” to destroy IS. It is using serious firepower. It is time to do the same with the online caliphate.