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Viral Jihad: a Genealogy of Al-Qaeda and ISIS' Propaganda

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Viral Jihad: a Genealogy of Al-Qaeda and ISIS' Propaganda Claremont Colleges Scholarship @ Claremont CMC Senior Theses CMC Student Scholarship 2021 Viral Jihad: A Genealogy of al-Qaeda and ISIS' Propaganda Renee Perper Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses Part of the International Relations Commons, and the Near and Middle Eastern Studies Commons Recommended Citation Perper, Renee, "Viral Jihad: A Genealogy of al-Qaeda and ISIS' Propaganda" (2021). CMC Senior Theses. 2694. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/2694 This Open Access Senior Thesis is brought to you by Scholarship@Claremont. It has been accepted for inclusion in this collection by an authorized administrator. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Claremont McKenna College Viral Jihad: A Genealogy of al-Qaeda and ISIS’ Propaganda Submitted to: Heather Ferguson & Hicham Bou Nassif By: Renee Perper For Senior Thesis Two Semester Thesis March 3, 2021 Abstract: For the past twenty years, the United States has been at war. Yet, while invocations of war often evoke images of soldiers on the battlefield, the war the U.S. has been fighting looks far different. In the past two decades, the U.S. has attempted to curb the impact of terrorist organizations’ media usage. This paper explores the genealogy of that media battle through a case study of al-Qaeda and ISIS’ media apparatuses. It argues that, often overlooked, is the role that media plays as a foundational element in both groups’ organizational structures. Moreover, this paper will demonstrate how ISIS has expounded on the success of al-Qaeda’s media strategy, thereby creating an online caliphate. Ultimately, this paper will conclude that new strategies and ways of thinking about the war on terror will need to be developed in for the U.S. to effectively combat both al-Qaeda and ISIS’ media. 2 Acknowledgements: I would like to dedicate this Senior Thesis to the Middle East Studies Department at Claremont McKenna College, the Middle East Islamic Studies Department at Colgate University, and the Religious Studies Department at Colgate University. It is with my sincerest gratitude that I must thank all the incredible professors that I have had the pleasure of working with over my undergraduate experience. I have had quite an unconventional, yet fulfilling college experience, but what kept me going every day was my passion for Middle Eastern politics, religion, and history. Of course, this love could not have developed without my wonderful professors. So, thank you, shukran, merci, and teşekkürler. 3 Table of Contents: INTRODUCTION 5 CHAPTER ONE: FRAMEWORKS OF REFERENCE 8 A Movement of Culture/Religious Fundamentalism 9 Contextualizing Jihad 9 The Rise of Secularism and State-Sponsored Violence 11 The Development of Salafi-Wahhabism 12 The Foundations of Islamism 13 Islamism in Practice: Ikhwanism 15 Global Jihad 17 A Global Movement 19 A Personalistic Movement 23 Abdallah Azzam 24 Osama Bin Laden 31 Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi 42 Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi 52 CHAPTER TWO: ORIGIN of al-QAEDA 60 Al-Qaeda’s Early History 60 Building a Global Reputation 65 “The Second Wave of Global Jihad” 70 #NeverForget 76 CHAPTER THREE: THE RISE AND FALL OF al- QAEDA in IRAQ (AQI) 80 Early Iterations of al-Qaeda in Iraq 80 Zarqawi Pledges Baya...Finally 87 The Rise of ISI 90 Division in Syria 96 The Great Divorce 98 CHAPTER FOUR: CALIPHATE.COM 101 Baqiyya wa Tatamaddad (Remaining and Expanding) 101 An Online Caliphate 103 Twitter Wars 106 Virtual Target Practice 112 CONCLUSION 116 BIBLIOGRAPHY 119 4 INTRODUCTION “We do not understand the movement [ISIS], and until we do, we are not going to defeat it. We have not defeated the idea. We do not understand the idea.”1 -Major General Michal K. Nagata “We are in a battle,” declared Ayman al-Zawahiri, deputy chief of al-Qaeda, in 2004. “We are in a battle, and more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media. And we are in a media battle in a race for the hearts and minds of our Umma.”2 Yet, just less than two decades after intercepting Zawahiri’s message, U.S. officials have failed to combat al-Qaeda’s media strategy. To continue Zawahiri’s battlefield metaphor, U.S. officials have barely even “deployed troops” to the media landscape. Al Qaeda has littered the internet with propaganda, but the U.S. has barely shot back. In fact, it was not until after al-Qaeda's propaganda push during the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 that counterterrorist experts began noting the potency of online terror. Al-Qaeda, and its Iraqi offshoot, now known as the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq (ISIS), changed the game completely. Al-Qaeda is the first guerilla movement to transform the war from an era of physical battles to Cyberspace. From web platforms complete with instructions on how to commit suicide attacks to its English-language magazine (Dabiq), al-Qaeda changed the way that terrorism and counterterrorism would be studied for years to come. To distribute their message, al-Qaeda Central Command (AQC) aptly used the Internet as a propaganda, recruitment, and training platform. AQC leadership quickly learned that it could reach a wider audience through a largely unregulated online domain. The sheer size of the AQC 1 Cole Bunzel, “From Paper State of Caliphate: The Ideology of the Islamic State,” Center for Middle East Policy at BROOKINGS, No. 19; (Mar 2014), 4. 2 Daniel L. Byman, “Will ISIS and al-Qaida Always be Rivals,” Brookings, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/markaz/2016/05/27/will-isis-and-al-qaida-always-be-rivals/. 5 media effort itself reflects a massive push on AQC's end to use this new platform, Cyberspace, to its benefit. Former CIA deputy director, John E. McLauglin, went so far as to describe al-Qaeda as a movement fueled by “ideology and the Internet.”3 Certainly, it is impossible to understand Al- Qaeda in the early 2000s without centralizing the role of Internet propaganda. Al-Qaeda’s command of the cyber-web domain set the stage for its Iraqi partner, ISIS, to master the next phase of the Internet revolution: social-media. Sheer numbers alone illuminate the proliferation of ISIS propaganda online. At the height of its Caliphate, ISIS boasted anywhere from 46,000 to 70,000 accounts on Twitter.4 Moreover, as this paper will further explore, ISIS created its own physical apparatuses for the distribution of propaganda. This includes control of all officially distributed propaganda through a Central Media Office (Diwan al-’l’lam al-Markaz), as well as through dozens of non-official and provincial-level offices.5 To date, the energy that ISIS has contributed to constructing a wide-spread apparatus across multiple social media platforms has proven difficult to combat. Despite the high level of success of ISIS and al-Qaeda’s online propaganda, few studies dissect the groups’ social media strategy. Moreover, the existent studies tend to focus on ISIS’ interactions on Twitter and ISIS’ English-language content, leaving most of al-Qaeda and ISIS’ propaganda untouched. Perhaps even more concerning is the lack of research pertaining to how media fits into the organizational structures over the organization. This paper aims to fill these gaps in research by situating al-Qaeda and ISIS in context to their media empires. 3 Steve Coll and Susan B. Glasser, “Terrorist Turn to the Web as Base of Operations,” The Washington Post. Aug 7, 2005. 4 J.M. Berger and Jonathon Morgan, “The ISIS Twitter census: Defining and describing the population of ISIS supporters on Twitter,” Brookings, Mar 5, 2015; Yet, it is important to note that some of these accounts are run by the same users. [See Chapter 4 for a further discussion of ISIS accounts.] 5 Daniel L. Byman and Jennifer R. Williams, “ISIS vs. Al Qaeda: Jihadism’s Global Civil War,” The Brookings Institution, 24 February 2015. Available at https://www.brookings.edu/articles/isis-vs-al-qaeda-jihadisms-global- civil-war; Bacon, Tricia, and Elizabeth Grimm Arsenault. “Al Qaeda and the Islamic State's Break: Strategic Strife or Lackluster Leadership?” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 42, no. 3 (2019): 229–63. 6 This paper contains four main components. First, this paper will extensively detail the frameworks that traditional academia uses to understand al-Qaeda and ISIS. In other words, it will explore the groups’ religious, geopolitical, and biographical underpinnings. Secondly, this paper will trace the origins of al-Qaeda, beginning with the Soviet Occupation of Afghanistan in 1979 and ending with the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001. Third, it will do a similar survey with ISIS, from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi first forming a jihadi organization in 1994 to the creation of an Islamic caliphate in 2014. In both its organizational purviews, this paper will make explicit note of the intersection of media with the formation of the two organizations. Finally, this paper will exhibit ISIS’ ultimate media strategy both regarding how ISIS utilizes media and how ISIS’ media usage impacts its success. Through this analysis, an abundance of factors will become clear. Media will be demonstrated as fundamental to the operational functionality of both al-Qaeda and ISIS. Additionally, ISIS’ media strategy will be revealed as not divorced from; but rather, a continuation of al-Qaeda’s own media strategy. Ultimately, this paper will argue that ISIS’ virtual operations are as fundamental to ISIS’ definition of its caliphate as its physical operations. The significance of such an argument is clear: with a better understanding of how al-Qaeda and ISIS conceptualize and weaponize their media operations, U.S. officials can more effectively wage a media war against the organizations.
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