Online Jihadist Magazines to Promote the Caliphate

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TABLES

Table 8.1. Matrix 1: Inspire Issue 15.

Table 8.2. Matrix 2: Inspire Issue 16.

Table 8.3. Matrix 3: Inspire Issue 17.

Table 8.4. Matrix 4: Dabiq Issue 13.

Table 8.5. Matrix 5: Dabiq Issue 14.

Table 8.6. Matrix 6: Dabiq Issue 15.

Table 8.7. Matrix 7: Rumiyah Issue 11.

Table 8.8. Matrix 8: Rumiyah Issue 12.

Table 8.9. Matrix 9: Rumiyah Issue 13.

Table 8.10. Matrix 10: Gaidi Mtaani Issue 7.

Table 8.11. Matrix 11: Gaidi Mtaani Issue 8.

Table 8.12. Matrix 12: Gaidi Mtaani Issue 9.

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INTRODUCTION

This book examines online jihadist magazines published by three terrorist organizations—Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and Al-Shabaab—and their aggressive promotion of the Caliphate. The magazines are Inspire, Dabiq, Rumiyah, and Gaidi Mtaani. They have played an important role in the diffusion of Islamist ideas such as jihad and sharia. In the twenty-first century, practically everyone is using the internet. Digital technology provides new opportunities for all communicators to convey their messages. Jihadist organizations are no exception. In fact, their growing visibility in the public sphere is a clear and present danger. They have embraced the new technology with particular enthusiasm and vigor. They produce a wide array of propagandistic materials in multiple languages and disseminate these communications through online platforms, reaching a wide international audience less interested in traditional print media. Their online capabilities allow them to broadcast their messages, bolster their international visibility, and radicalize potential recruits.

Accomplishing jihadist operations successfully is a resource-intensive undertaking. It requires jihadist organizations to (1) find new ways to avoid law enforcement detection, (2) seek alternative methods to topple the enemy (i.e., the Infidels and Apostates), (3) reach out to new recruits to expand their support base for global jihad and the Caliphate, and (4) replace fighters lost on the battlefield, through suicide bombings, or through arrests.¹ Since the ← 1 | 2 → early 2010s, Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and Al-Shabaab have made the internet their principal instrument of recruitment and propaganda, delivering their agenda in frequently slick packaging.2

The Advantages of the Internet for Jihadism

Terrorists recognize that the internet can help them convey their messages to international audiences on an unprecedented scale. One “conventional wisdom” is that terrorist movements have benefited from the widespread media coverage of their acts of violence. However, traditional reporting on terrorist attacks—i.e., which has often occurred through television news and newspaper coverage—is no longer the sole aid for terrorist groups in airing their grievances or recruiting new members. Today, they control their own websites, online forums, and online publications and, therefore, the means of reaching global audiences.

Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and Al-Shabaab have improved their recruitment thanks to online magazines that serve as propaganda machines. The magazines often mix narratives of extreme violence and Caliphate idealism. Although it should be acknowledged that these jihadist organizations pursue different strategies at different times based on specific circumstances, the overarching objective and justification for jihadist violence remain constant. A dangerous corollary is that the popularity and growth of terrorism in Western countries are due, in part, to the catalyst of these easily accessible magazines translated into various languages. The jihadists we should fear the most, then, are self-recruited individuals who find purpose in terror after reading online content like those magazines.

Face-to-face immediacy between the recruiter and the recruits is no longer essential: a radical imam in a mosque abroad can develop connections with Western Muslims, becoming a virtual spiritual guide for perpetrating extreme violence. This is precisely what happened in the famous case of Major Nidal Hasan (who killed 13 people at Fort Hood, TX in November 2009). Hasan had been in contact with Anwar Al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-American militant and preacher, dubbed the bin Laden of the internet, who inspired so many jihadists.³ Toward the end of his life, Al-Awlaki’s communication strategy revolved around encouraging and directing Americans to attack their homeland. He did so by using email messages, online videos, and the English-language online magazine Inspire (that he co-created), which told its readers “How to Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.”⁴ ← 2 | 3 →

One of the conclusions of this book is that online jihadist magazines are adaptive, dynamic instruments of jihadist discourse. The exponential growth of jihadist terrorism reflects the various phases it has experienced on the global stage since the September 11th, 2001 attacks. In fact, there seems to be a solid consensus among different government agencies, independent consultants, and experts that, ever since those attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon occurred, the rapid evolution of the internet has been the biggest motivator for people to develop extreme ideas and self-radicalize—some of which results in both homegrown and international terrorism. Furthermore, as the internet keeps evolving, so do the methods of recruiters who are using this technology to instigate terror.5 The internet, then, extends the capacity of terrorists to expand reach and influence. Spreading propaganda and drawing attention through online magazines have become central. A strong online presence can be even more essential to terrorist organizations than most other organizations.⁶

Why Are Online Jihadist Magazines the Medium of Choice?

Inspire, Dabiq, Rumiyah, and Gaidi Mtaani are only part of the larger digitization of jihadist recruitment materials and propaganda, which includes everything from online discussion boards to beheading videos. These four online jihadist magazines are a medium of choice for their efficiency of production and their unprecedented ability to deliver information to massive audiences worldwide. The magazines are relatively simple to produce and require little effort to digitally store and distribute data. They also provide clear information, not only for the sake of potential radicalization and recruitment of readers, but also for tactical instruction, communication of goals, and organizational updates.

An Ideal Medium Through the Internet

These magazines are produced with relative ease, and their format provides a sense of legitimacy and fidelity to the brand of the terrorist group. Each portable document format (PDF) issue of the magazines offers a wide variety of content to readers at little cost to the producers. Once published through PDFs, the magazines are distributed online, requiring little digital space for storage and hosting. Both the production and the distribution of these online ← 3 | 4 → magazines are efficient. The web is a dominant source to release the jihadist organizations’ messages in order to contact as many potential followers as possible. Within the magazines, accountability, persuasion, and detailed specific missions are omnipresent. In comparison with magazines, jihadist propaganda videos are often shorter and not as thorough.7 Hence, online jihadist magazines can be more influential than jihadist videos. In fact, it is much easier for online platforms such as YouTube to censor jihadist videos than online jihadist magazines.⁸

The latter also include abundant information and can provide links to the jihadist videos themselves. They often include historical contexts of holy Muslim wars, religious scriptures, current missions, and meticulous preparations of potential attacks. Given these considerations, this is an ideal vehicle for jihadist recruitment. The accelerating rise of jihadist recruitment is attributed, in large part, to the online jihadist magazine as it serves as a platform to mold and persuade followers. There is no question that this is a favorite medium of choice and a catalyst for terrorist operations.⁹

The Power of Visual and Textual Information

Online magazines are also ideal for jihadist groups because they are a mélange of print magazines and blogs. Their visual information contains actual photographs of terrorists in action, the bodies of their victims, and representative images of Middle-Eastern conflicts—as exemplified in the cover of Issue 4 of Dabiq, titled “The Failed Crusade.” This cover features a doctored image of the ISIS flag flying over the Vatican. Though these images are well formatted and professionally produced, the photographs are repeatedly present across multiple magazine issues. Textually, the content of the magazines also varies widely, from organizational news to jihadist profiles. Much of the written content is existent within the groups at the time of the creation of the issue in which the content appears (e.g., as internal whitepapers or memos). The magazine editors simply take the existent written content and match it with suitable images for compilation in the final document.¹⁰

Another important point is the density in which information is conveyable through just one document. For example, a recurring column present in Dabiq, “In the Words of the Enemy,” quotes Western politicians and publications, reframing their words to favor ISIS, making the group appear even more threatening. This column serves as narrative propaganda. At the same times, there are articles present in the magazines that serve to communicate ← 4 | 5 → straightforward tactical instructions, particularly catered to lone-wolf terrorists. These include the aforementioned “How to Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom” article featured in Inspire. The wide variety of articles in a single document give readers a type of handbook of Islamist terrorism, combining recruitment propaganda, tactical instruction, and organizational updates in one source.

The Communicative Power of Online Jihadist Magazines

A widespread assumption in academic circles is that strategic communication is crucial to terrorism. Strategic communication intends “to persuade an audience to support one or more specific goals.”¹¹ The audience is the main receiver of a message and the one who derives meaning out of it. Effective strategic communication depends on a profound understanding of the receiver’s culture and how “things” tend to be interpreted based on cultural narratives.¹² Without effective strategic communication, online jihadist magazines would have little value or impact. The communicative power of those magazines must be understood within the context of today’s world, where militant Muslims are fully cognizant of the supremacy of Western civilization and, by the same token, the social, economic, and political weaknesses of many Muslim-majority countries. The notion of “narrative,” in particular, is often incorporated into the examination of the roots of terrorism.¹³ The master narratives featured in online jihadist magazines serve the political goals of Islamic extremists. This makes jihadist rhetoric both pervasive and persuasive because it creates a system of meaning that can shape readers’ perceptions, galvanize support, and persuade individuals with no prior experience of violence to commit terrorism.¹⁴

Overall, online jihadist magazines are a potent tool of political mobilization through which militants can help their Muslim “brothers and sisters” re-interpret complex, often tragic events. It is a tool that introduces them to the dream of the Caliphate; a dazzling vision of the future in which Muslims will ultimately prevail. All four magazines, Inspire, Dabiq, Rumiyah, and Gaidi Mtaani, have radicalized readers to the point of perpetrating lone-wolf attacks both in the West and abroad. For example, Al-Qaeda’s Inspire has an “open source jihad” segment. Open source jihad is a master narrative based on leaderless jihad that facilitates the occurrence of lone-wolf terrorism. It is a well-crafted resource manual that offers technical recommendations for attacks such as bomb-making techniques and weapons training.¹⁵ ← 5 | 6 →

Islamist Ideology and the Caliphate

We are fully aware that there are myriad other Islam-related subjects to explore, but most of them would fall beyond the scope of this book. At its core, it is the ideology of the Islamist movement that feeds the political and religious motivations for jihadism. Islamist ideology is a system of ideas that seeks to propagate sharia and the Caliphate around the world. Sharia is a body of Islamic law that has contributed, in part, to the Islamic tradition.¹⁶ Master narratives in Islam fulfill important ideological functions, which exist at multiple levels of Muslim society and culture, but they have been “exploited and employed specifically by Islamic extremists.”¹⁷ Two core elements of Islamism are (1) the authority of the Quran and Sunnah (traditions of the Prophet Muhammad) over all aspects of life and (2) a view of tawhid (Islamic monotheism or the oneness of Allah) in radical terms, whereby the authority of state and society depends on a full implementation of sharia, which remains the law of the land in many Muslim-majority countries.¹⁸ From these core elements emerges a view of ideal Muslims as members of the ummah (the unity of Muslims on Earth) and the global polity of the Caliphate. Under these circumstances, Islamists in general and Salafists in particular are developing a theoretical alternative to Western values and institutions.¹⁹

The Caliphate is an Islamic system of world government that seeks to create a new world order by overturning the existing order. The Caliphate is defined as “a one world Muslim government, like a grand Islamic state, led by a supreme religious and political leader called the ‘caliph.’”²⁰ As the leader of the global Muslim community, the Caliph heads the Caliphate and is the ultimate successor of the Prophet Muhammad.²¹ Muslims extremists believe that the Caliphate will be established as an emerging culture that will attract diverse fanatics and supporters across the globe. This Islamic goal originates from ancient jihadist culture and is the fundamental doctrine of ISIS, Al-Qaeda, and Al-Shabaab. Their objective is to secure global change of jihadist beliefs as depicted in the Quran and establish a sharia-based government on Earth strictly devoted to Allah.²²

Twenty-first-century extremists have attempted to diffuse worldwide Caliphate ideology through technology. This has been effective in Middle-Eastern regions, specifically Iraq, Syria, and Africa, with rapid domination of land and natural resources by use of deadly forces.²³ These territories have a multitude of prominent Caliphate-oriented institutions. Jihadist organizations are vigilantly selecting locations to establish the Caliphate, by beginning with ← 6 | 7 → regions that currently have jihadist support for enlistment and operational support.24 Jihadists plan to spread sharia and jihad by planting seeds in all countries in an attempt to conquer the entire world. The Caliphate is not only a physical endeavor, but also an ideological fight. The jihadist organizations do seek to control all lands and waters on Earth. Beyond the power over territory (physical endeavor), the jihadist ideology is to be implemented once the land is confiscated (ideological fight).²⁵ The lands are taken, oftentimes by military forces, and used to spread and embrace the ideals of their beliefs. The power over land is only the beginning to fulfill the purpose of the jihadist ideology.²⁶

The birth of the modern Caliphate was revived in Iraq by ISIS in June 2014 and exploded with great prosperity because of the wealth from the land. The land brought harvest supply and provided transportation by canals in the surrounding rivers.²⁷ Today, the idea of Caliphate is interpreted to offer more than prosperity of land and wealth. Jihadist organizations consider the Caliphate as “a new era of might and dignity for Muslims.”²⁸ The restoration of global Muslim rule has been exemplified through Islamic revival (e.g., the Arab Spring in 2011), stricter national laws, and deep-rooted Muslim education.²⁹ The Caliphate is the “one state” by Allah and denies all other standing nations and their ways of life. According to Caliphate-focused organizations, if the world does not abide by sharia, jihadist terrorism will be the logical consequence.³⁰ The devotion to the Caliphate has driven jihadist organizations to use technology as a tool to spread global power. For example, ISIS did this in 2015 by declaring a cyberwar on the U.S. government. The “Cyber Caliphate” imposed a hacking stream to the Pentagon’s Central Command and gained power of social media accounts.³¹

Contributions of This Book

Jihadism has become the subject of many recent published works that range from books to journal articles, from literature reviews to journalistic accounts, from theoretical analyses to empirical studies, and from academic theses to governmental publications, all of which attempt to examine jihadist trends and issues across the world.³² Although jihad remains a popular topic, the publication of manuscripts that explore online jihadist magazines is rather limited. After all, such online propaganda machines relate to human behavior and motivations to perpetrate terrorist attacks against innocent civilians (by militants who are often willing to take their own lives in the process). ← 7 | 8 →

This book is the first major work that provides a detailed examination of four major online jihadist magazines—Inspire, Dabiq, Rumiyah, and Gaidi Mtaani—combined in a single manuscript and divided into ten chapters. As the jihadist threat is on the rise and claims thousands of innocent lives every year, this book extends existing research by offering fresh insights on the communicative strategies, radicalization processes, and recruitment methods used by jihadist organizations as well as their effects on readers. In particular, this book includes the following topics:

This book also illustrates a few paradoxes. First, the internet is both enabling and constraining human progress. As a hallmark of globalization, the internet constitutes both a force for human advance and the leveling of the playing field for all actors (including violent non-state actors). Through online jihadist magazines, the internet can be exploited to arouse political and religious sentiments and spark a struggle for global domination (e.g., the Caliphate). Second, just like communication is crucial to terrorism, communication is also crucial to counterterrorism. As demonstrated in Chapter 10, the very last chapter, it takes communication to fight communication. To the extent that the Islamist ideology can be countered or delegitimized, the best way to ← 8 | 9 → destabilize the global jihadist movement is by preventing jihadist activists to recruit and maintain online bases of support; this can be done through counter-narratives. Therefore, that last chapter would be useful to those wishing to combat or restrain the ideological influence of online jihadist propagandists amongst their reader base. One important suggestion that we have offered is the creation of online counter-radicalization magazines. As such, 15 recommendations for counter-narratives and appealing messages are detailed for online users, particularly those who are vulnerable to online radicalization.

Other Objectives of This Book

There are three other objectives that were not mentioned in the previous sections and that can further elucidate the purpose of this book: (1) Examining online jihadist magazines, not internet-based attacks such as hacking (or cyberterrorism), (2) advancing communication theories vis-à-vis jihadist magazines, and (3) exploring similarities and differences between jihadist magazines.

Examining Online Jihadist Magazines, Not Online Hacking