The Media World of ISIS
The Media World of ISIS

Author: Rosemary Pennington

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2019-11-01

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0253045940

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From efficient instructions on how to kill civilians to horrifying videos of beheadings, no terrorist organization has more comprehensively weaponized social media than ISIS. Its strategic, multiplatformed campaign is so effective that it has ensured global news coverage and inspired hundreds of young people around the world to abandon their lives and their countries to join a foreign war. The Media World of ISIS explores the characteristics, mission, and tactics of the organization's use of media and propaganda. Contributors consider how ISIS's media strategies imitate activist tactics, legitimize its self-declared caliphate, and exploit narratives of suffering and imprisonment as propaganda to inspire followers. Using a variety of methods, contributors explore the appeal of ISIS to Westerners, the worldview made apparent in its doctrine, and suggestions for counteracting the organization's approaches. Its highly developed, targeted, and effective media campaign has helped make ISIS one of the most recognized terrorism networks in the world. Gaining a comprehensive understanding of its strategies—what worked and why—will help combat the new realities of terrorism in the 21st century.

Media Persuasion in the Islamic State
Media Persuasion in the Islamic State

Author: Neil Krishan Aggarwal

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2019-03-12

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 023154412X

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Since the declaration of the War on Terror in 2001, militant groups such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State have used the internet to disseminate their message and persuade people to commit violence. While many books have studied their operational strategies and battlefield tactics, Media Persuasion in the Islamic State is the first to analyze the culture and psychology of militant persuasion. Drawing upon decades of research in cultural psychiatry, cultural psychology, and psychiatric anthropology, Neil Krishan Aggarwal investigates how the Islamic State has convinced people to engage in violence since its founding in 2003. Through analysis of hundreds of articles, speeches, videos, songs, and bureaucratic documents in English and Arabic, the book traces how the jihadist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi created a new culture and psychology, one that would pit Sunni Muslims against all others after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Aggarwal tracks how Osama bin Laden and al-Zarqawi disagreed over the goal of militancy in jihad before reaching a détente in 2004 and how al-Qaeda in Iraq merged with five other groups to diffuse its militant cultural identity in 2006 before taking advantage of the Syrian civil war to emerge as the Islamic State. Aggarwal offers a definitive analysis of how culture is created, debated, and disseminated within militant organizations like the Islamic State. Psychiatrists, psychologists, and area-studies experts will find a comprehensive, systematic method for analyzing culture and psychology so they can partner with political scientists, policy makers, and counterterrorism experts in crafting counter-messaging strategies against militants.

ISIS Beyond the Spectacle
ISIS Beyond the Spectacle

Author: Mehdi Semati

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-04-02

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 0429894945

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What is ISIS? A quasi-state? A terrorist group? A movement? An ideology? As ISIS has transformed and mutated, gained and lost territory, horrified the world and been its punch line, media have been central to understanding it. The changing, yet constant, relationship between ISIS and the media, as well as its adversaries’ dependency on media to make sense of ISIS, is central to this book. More than just the images of mutilated bodies that garnered ISIS its initial infamy, the book considers an ISIS media world that includes infographics, administrative reports, and various depictions of a post-racial utopia in which justice is swift and candy is bought and sold with its own currency. The book reveals that the efforts of ISIS and its adversaries to communicate and make sense of this world share modes of visual, aesthetic, and journalistic practice and expression. The short tumultuous history of ISIS does not allow for a single approach to understanding its relation to media. Thus, the book’s contributions are to be read as contrapuntal analyses that productively connect and disconnect, providing a much-needed complex account of the ISIS-media relationship. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Studies in Media Communication.

The ISIS Reader
The ISIS Reader

Author: Haroro J. Ingram

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0197501435

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A sober analysis of IS's media and propaganda output, essential for understanding what drives the movement.

Inside ISIS
Inside ISIS

Author: Benjamin Hall

Publisher: Center Street

Published: 2015-03-10

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 1455590568

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A year ago, few people had heard of ISIS-- today, they are a major terrorist threat. Despite numerous warnings from intelligence services, ISIS's rise to power has left countries around the world floundering for solutions. Today, we face a threat that is more violent, powerful and financially stronger than ever before. In this book, Journalist Benjamin Hall will provide insights by answering the basic questions we still don't have the answers to; Who are they? Where did they come from? How are they so successful, so quickly? How can they be stopped? By embedding himself behind enemy lines, Hall provides a riveting narrative based on firsthand experience and personal interviews. He goes beyond the vicious jihadis, to reveal a generation of chaos, and uncover a volatile region engulfed in turmoil. Hall reveals why ISIS is a problem that will define the Middle East - and the West - for decades to come.

ISIS
ISIS

Author: Michael Weiss

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2015-01-29

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1941393713

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A revelatory look inside the world's most dangerous terrorist group. Initially dismissed by US President Barack Obama, along with other fledgling terrorist groups, as a “jayvee squad” compared to al-Qaeda, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has shocked the world by conquering massive territories in both countries and promising to create a vast new Muslim caliphate that observes the strict dictates of Sharia law. In ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, American journalist Michael Weiss and Syrian analyst Hassan Hassan explain how these violent extremists evolved from a nearly defeated Iraqi insurgent group into a jihadi army of international volunteers who behead Western hostages in slickly produced videos and have conquered territory equal to the size of Great Britain. Beginning with the early days of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of ISIS’s first incarnation as “al-Qaeda in Iraq,” Weiss and Hassan explain who the key players are—from their elusive leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to the former Saddam Baathists in their ranks—where they come from, how the movement has attracted both local and global support, and where their financing comes from. Political and military maneuvering by the United States, Iraq, Iran, and Syria have all fueled ISIS’s astonishing and explosive expansion. Drawing on original interviews with former US military officials and current ISIS fighters, the authors also reveal the internecine struggles within the movement itself, as well as ISIS’s bloody hatred of Shiite Muslims, which is generating another sectarian war in the region. Just like the one the US thought it had stopped in 2011 in Iraq. Past is prologue and America’s legacy in the Middle East is sowing a new generation of terror.

Islamic State
Islamic State

Author: Abdel-Bari Atwan

Publisher: Saqi

Published: 2015-05-04

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 0863561012

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Based on interviews with Islamic State insiders, Abdel Bari Atwan reveals the origins and modus operandi of the fastest-growing and richest terrorist group in the world. Outlining its leadership structure and strategies, Atwan describes the group's ideological differences with al-Qa`ida and why IS appear to pose a greater threat to the West. He shows how it has masterfully used social media, Hollywood `blockbuster'-style videos, and even jihadi computer games to spread its message and to recruit young people, from Tunisia to Bradford. As Islamic State continues to dominate the world's media headlines with acts of ruthless violence, Atwan considers its chances of survival and offers indispensable insight into potential government responses to contain the IS threat.

The Future of ISIS
The Future of ISIS

Author: Feisal al-Istrabadi

Publisher: Brookings Institution Press

Published: 2018-06-26

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0815732171

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Looking to the future in confronting the Islamic State The Islamic State (best known in the West as ISIS or ISIL) has been active for less than a decade, but it has already been the subject of numerous histories and academic studies—all focus primarily on the past. The Future of ISIS is the first major study to look ahead: what are the prospects for the Islamic State in the near term, and what can the global community, including the United States, do to counter it? Edited by two distinguished scholars at Indiana University, the book examines how ISIS will affect not only the Middle East but the global order. Specific chapters deal with such questions as whether and how ISIS benefitted from intelligence failures, and what can be done to correct any such failures; how to confront the alarmingly broad appeal of Islamic State ideology; the role of local and regional actors in confronting ISIS; and determining U.S. interests in preventing ISIS from gaining influence and controlling territory. Given the urgency of the topic, The Future of ISIS is of interest to policymakers, analysts, and students of international affairs and public policy.

Rise of ISIS
Rise of ISIS

Author: Jay Sekulow

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2014-10-14

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13: 1501105132

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Jay Sekulow closely examines the rise of the terrorist groups ISIS, their objectives and capabilities.

The Way of the Strangers
The Way of the Strangers

Author: Graeme Wood (Journalist)

Publisher:

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 0812988752

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"The Way of the Strangers is an intimate journey into the minds of the Islamic State's true believers. From the streets of Cairo to the mosques of London, Wood interviews supporters, recruiters, and sympathizers of the group...Wood speaks with non-Islamic State Muslim scholars and jihadists, and explores the group's idiosyncratic, coherent approach to Islam...Through character study and analysis, Wood provides a clear-eyed look at a movement that has inspired so many people to abandon or uproot their families.