Information Wars. Richard Stengel
#NewMessageFromISIStoUS.22 One tweeted a picture of an ISIS flag on a cell phone with an image of the White House in the background.23 YouTube removed the Foley video three hours later, but it had already gotten hundreds of thousands of views. Highlights from it had been broadcast to millions by every global news channel.24
James Foley had been kidnapped in Syria nearly two years earlier. He was a freelance journalist who had been working for Agence France-Presse. He had once worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Baghdad. He had written for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes while in Afghanistan. He had worked for the news service GlobalPost in Libya, where he had been captured by rebels and held for 44 days. Foley was a young, white American male who could have passed for one of the American soldiers in Iraq. That was the idea. Putting him in an orange tunic was meant to evoke the garb of the prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. ISIS had found their poster boy.
The Foley video transformed what had been an obscure offshoot in the world of Muslim extremism into a gigantic global brand known to billions: ISIS. The black flag. The severed head. It was meant to show them as ruthless, magnetic, messianic, and undeterred by American power. Men in black. Avengers of Sunni Islam. Holy warriors.
The video had an even more practical purpose: it was a recruitment ad for ISIS’s extreme army—ISIS’s version of the U.S. Marine Corps’ TV ads in the 1980s to recruit “a few good men.” After all, ISIS was also a volunteer army that required a steady flow of recruits. Its appeal was both religious and adventurous—if you want to lop off some American heads and go to heaven in the process, come to Iraq and Syria. Violent Islamic adventure tourism. Their proposition was zero sum—join us, or be a kafir (an apostate) and die.
This was how most Americans, and most people around the world, were introduced to ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
But ISIS was not new to CSCC. They had spotted an escalation of ISIS social media in the spring of 2014. ISIS, they informed me, already had a media arm called Al-Hayat, which a couple of weeks before had released an English-subtitled video showing young children breaking their Ramadan fast with ISIS warriors. A week later, to mark the Eid al-Fitr feast at the end of Ramadan, they had released a video that showed a mass execution of Syrians. They mixed the grisly with the G-rated. Less than a month after releasing Foley’s execution video, ISIS fighters had started a meme of fighters posing with jars of Nutella. The Nutella was meant to suggest that life in the Caliphate was sweet. It was a double-edged campaign: graphic violence to scare America and the West, and sunny travel ads to recruit foreign fighters.
I pushed CSCC to do more counter-ISIS messaging. They sent me a plan, saying their target audience was “Sunni Iraqis, pan-Arab, and global”—unfocused, but at least they were starting. They launched a series of tweets around themes of brutality, betrayal, and the limits of sectarianism. Here are a few, translated from the Arabic.
ISIS has betrayed you before, will betray you again. @CSCC @ThinkAgain_DOS
ISIS’s barbarism is its only real goal. It has no religious justification. @CSCC @ThinkAgain_DOS
The United States will not assist those who throw their lot in with ISIS. @CSCC @ThinkAgain_DOS
“Think Again, Turn Away” was CSCC’s motto. The tweets got a bit of traffic, and some responses from digital jihadis accusing CSCC of being a tool of the State Department. When we pointed out ISIS’s hypocrisy, the digital jihadis pointed out ours. @de_BlackRose tweeted: “Remember how American arrested and humiliated our brothers in Iraq,” next to a graphic image from Abu Ghraib. CSCC replied: “US troops are punished for misconduct, #ISIS fighters are rewarded.” I’m not sure CSCC changed the minds of any young men thinking of going to fight in Iraq and Syria, but it was something.
But tweeting was not going to stop ISIS from executing the other American journalist they had shown at the end of the video—like a cliff-hanger in a serial—Steven Sotloff.
Punching Back
Sometimes knowledge can be a barrier to starting something new.
My very ignorance of how things worked at State actually helped me launch something we hadn’t done before.
I had looked around the department and I didn’t see any entity that could push back against all the Russian propaganda and disinformation surrounding Crimea and Ukraine. The European bureau was reticent—messaging of any kind was just not what they did.
There was one large, wonderful exception to State’s social media passivity: Geoff Pyatt, our ambassador to Ukraine. Geoff was all over social media: he was tweeting dozens of times a day, not only his own strong anti-Russian tweets but also regularly retweeting the reports of journalists and observers who were calling out Russia for its actions. Pyatt didn’t think Russian lies should go unchallenged.
I had a number of conversations with Pyatt, and he encouraged me to do something. I decided to call a meeting with representatives from EUR, PA, PD, and the spokesperson’s office to discuss the idea of starting an internal counter-Russian messaging hub. Actually, I didn’t quite say that. I said we were going to meet to discuss what could be done about Russian propaganda.
We had the meeting in the big conference room adjacent to my office. I had planned on opening with a discussion of the hub idea, but we happened to have a young public affairs officer from Kiev who was visiting. I thought it might be interesting to hear from him first. He was a burly, bearded, Russian-speaking foreign service officer who had been in Kiev for the past year. Before that, he had spent two years in Moscow. Like so many of the people serving in Ukraine, he was passionate about what he had seen.
“The Russians,” he said, “have a big engine. They are working overtime on building a compelling narrative—a narrative that undermines democracy in Ukraine. They say the same things day in and day out. These are the three big lies they repeat again and again:
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