At the 2:10 mark in a video entitled The Meaning of Stability #2, which the Islamic State released in mid-January, a soon-to-be suicide bomber appears on camera alongside his explosives-laden truck. There is nothing remarkable about the fact that this masked young man is moments away from incinerating himself and untold others in a Libyan city—such farewell scenes are common in these videos. But this is the first time an Islamic State bomber’s last moments will be captured by a drone.

A minute later, after the bomber has hugged his comrades good-bye, the drone soars high above his truck as he drives through an urban block and detonates his payload. The video shows a wide-angle shot of the carnage from the sky; it then cuts to footage of someone holding a Samsung Galaxy phone that’s displaying the drone’s-eye view of the explosion. It was a seminal moment in one of the Islamic State’s favorite media genres.

Zarqawi was trying to recruit from the extremist fringe that gets excited by such cruel behavior as beheadings.

The Islamic State has long taken pride in its flair for developing content that is innovative and repugnant in equal measure. Back in 2004, when the organization was known as al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), it earned substantial notoriety by releasing videos showing the beheadings of captives such as Nick Berg, a telecommunications engineer from Pennsylvania. This novel propaganda tactic rankled Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian surgeon who was then the top deputy to al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden. He wrote a letter to AQI’s leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in which he urged him to be mindful of how depictions of extreme bloodshed might damage al Qaeda’s reputation. “I say to you that we are in a battle, and that more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media,” al Qaeda’s Zawahiri wrote. “And that we are in a media battle in a race for the hearts and minds of our Umma [Muslim people].” He asked Zarqawi to refrain from future beheadings, lest the masses be turned off by images of his cruelty.

But Zarqawi ignored his superior’s request. Cultivating broad appeal was not his plan; in the parlance of American politics, he aimed to play to the base. “Zarqawi was trying to recruit from the extremist fringe that gets excited by this sort of behavior,” says Will McCants, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Middle East Policy and the author of The ISIS Apocalypse. Zarqawi’s videos, spread via Internet forums and email, made their way onto the hard drives of aspiring jihadists who were energized by their gore. Zarqawi believed that attracting such vicious fighters was the key to fulfilling his fantasy of creating an Islamic state.

As Zarqawi was pioneering his video strategy, a jihadist theorist who wrote under the pseudonym Abu Bakr Naji published an ebook that would become the Islamic State’s blueprint: 2004’s The Management of Savagery. The book argued that jihadist groups should venture into regions beset by anarchy, where local populations would welcome their ability to institute basic governance and Islamic sharia law. Over time, these regions, like inkblots, would expand and coalesce into a contiguous Muslim empire, or caliphate.

Milestones in Terror Tech An extremist movement’s success often depends on its ability to master the latest means of communication. —Victoria Tang





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To abet that process, Naji urged jihadists to combat the “deceptive media halo” that the West had supposedly created. “He felt there was this Western narrative, particularly this American narrative, that America is this unconquerable nation that is undivided, undefeated, and can never be thwarted,” says McCants, who translated The Management of Savagery from the original Arabic. “But he argued that if the jihadists had their own media capabilities that were able to provide the ‘truth,’ it would undermine the deceptive media halo.” To that end, Naji advised his readers to study the West’s media so they could understand how best to mimic its methods of persuasion.

After Zarqawi was killed by an American air strike in June 2006, AQI rebranded itself as the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI). The organization was considered a middling menace until it ramped up operations in war-torn Syria in 2013, thereby transforming into the now-familiar ISIS. Under the leadership of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a wily political operator who claims to be a descendant of the prophet Muhammad, ISIS took advantage of Syria’s misery to put Naji’s theories in action: It swept into cities where chaos reigned and brought some semblance of order through a combination of administrative competence and raw brutality. At the same time, ISIS exploited sectarian tensions in Iraq to capture a significant chunk of that country, including the pivotal northern city of Mosul.

GoPro cameras have been affixed to AK-47s and sniper rifles, resulting in first-person scenes that seem plucked from Call of Duty.

The shrewd use of digital media was integral to ISIS’ lightning-fast expansion in 2013 and 2014. The group’s media wing, al-Furqan, documented every aspect of its offensives, paying special attention to the grisly fates of members of the Syrian and Iraqi regimes. The fourth installment of the Clanging of the Swords video series, for example, released in May 2014, plays like a satanic episode of Cops: Videographers with handheld equipment ride along with ISIS death squads as they pursue and assassinate Iraqi security personnel, some of whom are shown begging for their lives. These videos helped persuade police and soldiers in other cities to melt away rather than resist when they heard that ISIS forces were on the march.

As it established the rudiments of a functioning state, ISIS also was building a decentralized media syndicate. Each wilayat, or province, now runs its own media office, staffed by camera operators and editors who churn out localized content from Nigeria to Afghanistan. (In a November 2015 interview with The Washington Post, a former Islamic State camera operator from Morocco claimed he had been paid $700 per month, or seven times more than the typical fighter.) The provincial media offices are also responsible for managing “media points”—kiosks or roving vans that distribute indoctrination materials to the residents of newly conquered cities (usually on USB drives or SIM cards). Since the Islamic State tightly restricts access to the Internet or mobile networks, the group’s audio and video become the only legal digital information in the region.

To persuade foreigners to emigrate to the caliphate, the Islamic State produces—in addition to martyrdom videos—literature and videos that emphasize its alleged utopian aspects, particularly the freedom from any trace of religious persecution. “What they are able to say now is ‘You don’t have to just hold the idea of a caliphate in your mind—this is real, this is tangible, and you can come here and flourish and bring your families,’” says John Horgan, a professor at Georgia State University’s Global Studies Institute and the author of The Psychology of Terrorism. In one 21-minute video entitled Honor Is in Jihad: A Message to the People of the Balkans, a smiling Albanian fighter is shown holding his pigtailed daughter’s hand at an outdoor market that abounds with fruit. He assures his fellow Albanian Muslims that if they come to the caliphate, they will never again have to worry about police “finding your wives uncovered” during midnight raids.