The assignments arrive on slips of paper, each bearing the black flag of Daesh (the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant), the seal of the terrorist group’s media emir, and the site of that day’s shoot.
“The paper just gives you the location,” never the details, said Abu Hajer Al Maghribi, who spent nearly a year as a cameraman for Daesh. Sometimes the job was to film prayers at a mosque, he said, or militants exchanging fire. But inevitably, a slip would come with the coordinates to an unfolding bloodbath.
For Abu Hajer, that card told him to drive two hours southwest of the Syrian city of Raqqa, the capital of the “caliphate”, or Islamic realm, declared by the militant group. There, he discovered that he was among 10 cameramen sent to record the final hours of more than 160 Syrian soldiers captured in 2014.
“I held my Canon camera,” he said, as the soldiers were stripped to their underwear, marched into the desert, forced to their knees and massacred with automatic rifles.
His footage quickly found a global audience, released online in a Daesh video that spread on social media and appeared in mainstream news coverage on Al Jazeera and other networks.
Abu Hajer, who is now in prison in Morocco, is among more than a dozen Daesh defectors or members in several countries who provided detailed accounts of their involvement in, or exposure to, the most potent propaganda machine ever assembled by a terrorist group.
What they described resembles a medieval reality show. Camera crews fan out across the “caliphate” every day, their ubiquitous presence distorting the events they purportedly document. Battle scenes and public beheadings are so scripted and staged that fighters and executioners often perform multiple takes and read their lines from cue cards.
Cameras, computers and other video equipment arrive in regular shipments from Turkey. They are delivered to a media division dominated by foreigners — including at least one American, according to those interviewed — whose production skills often stem from previous jobs they held at news channels or technology companies.
Senior media operatives are treated as “emirs” of equal rank to their military counterparts. They are directly involved in decisions on strategy and territory. They preside over hundreds of videographers, producers and editors who form a privileged, professional class with status, salaries and living arrangements that are the envy of ordinary fighters.
“It is a whole army of media personnel,” said Abu Abdullah Al Maghribi, a second defector who served in Daesh’s security ranks but had extensive involvement with its propaganda teams.
“The media people are more important than the soldiers,” he said. “Their monthly income is higher. They have better cars. They have the power to encourage those inside to fight and the power to bring more recruits to the Islamic State.”
Increasingly, that power extends beyond the borders of the “caliphate”. The attacks in Paris were carried out by militants who belonged to a floating population of Daesh followers, subjects who are scattered among dozens of countries and whose attachments to the group exist mainly online.
Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the alleged architect of the attacks who was killed in a raid in France, had appeared repeatedly in Daesh recruiting materials. The barrage of videos and statements released afterward made clear that the overriding goal of Daesh is not merely to inflict terror on an adversary but also to command a global audience.
The United States and its allies have found no meaningful answer to this propaganda avalanche. A State Department programme to counter Daesh’s messaging has cycled through a series of initiatives with minimal effect. Daesh supporters online have repeatedly slipped around efforts to block them on Twitter and Facebook.
Overmatched online, the United States has turned to lethal force. Recent US airstrikes have killed several high-level operatives in Daesh’s media division, including Junaid Hussain, a British computer expert. FBI Director James B. Comey recently described the propaganda units of Daesh, also known as Isil and Isis, as military targets.
“I am optimistic that the actions of our colleagues in the military to reduce the supply of Isil tweeters will have an impact,” Comey said at an event last month in Washington. “But we’ll have to watch that space and see.”
Research for this article involved interviews with Daesh defectors and members, as well as security officials and counterterrorism experts in six countries on three continents. The most authoritative accounts came from seven Daesh defectors who were either in prison in Morocco or recently released after facing terrorism charges upon their return from Syria. All spoke on the condition that they be identified only by the adopted names that they used in Syria.
Those interviews were conducted with the permission of the Moroccan government in the administrative wing of a prison complex near the nation’s capital. The prisoners said they spoke voluntarily after being approached by Moroccan authorities. Other prisoners declined. Most of the interviews took place in the presence of security officials, an arrangement that probably led participants to play down their roles in Daesh but seemed to have little effect on their candour in describing the caliphate’s media division.
Abu Hajer, a soft-spoken Moroccan with a thin beard and lean physique, said he had been active in Islamist media circles for more than a decade before he entered Syria in 2013. He began participating in online Islamist forums after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, he said, and later became an administrator of an influential site known as Shamukh, giving him authority to admit new members and monitor the material other militants posted.
Those credentials cleared his path to coveted assignments within Daesh, a group that began as Al Qaida’s affiliate in Iraq before splitting off from that terrorist network in an ideological rupture two years ago.
The group has an elaborate system for evaluating and training new arrivals. Abu Hajer said that shortly after entering Syria he was groomed to be part of Daesh’s media team. He spent two months undergoing basic military training before he was admitted to a special, month-long programme for media operatives.
The programme “specialises in how to do filming. How to mix footage. How to get the right voice and tone” in interviews, he said. After completing the course, he was given a Canon camera, a Samsung Galaxy smartphone and an assignment with the Daesh’s media unit in Raqqa.
Abu Hajer, who is in his mid-30s, had come from an impoverished corner of Morocco. Now that he is in prison, his wife and children have returned to the encampment where they lived before departing, a shanty village of corrugated tin and plywood with no running water near a cement plant on the outskirts of Rabat.
In Syria, they were given a villa with a garden. Abu Hajer was issued a car, a Toyota Hilux with four-wheel drive to enable him to reach remote assignments. He was also paid a salary of $700 (Dh2,571) a month — seven times the sum paid to typical fighters — plus money for food, clothes and equipment. He said he was also excused from the taxes that Daesh imposes on most of its subjects.
He quickly settled into a routine that involved getting his work assignments each morning on pieces of paper that also served as travel documents enabling him to pass Daesh checkpoints. Most jobs were mundane, such as capturing scenes from markets or celebrations of Muslim holidays.
Abu Hajer said he encountered only one Western hostage, John Cantlie, a British war correspondent who was kidnapped in Syria in 2012. Cantlie was cast by his captors in a series of BBC-style news reports that touted Daesh’s bustling economies and adherence to Islamic law while mocking Western governments.
Abu Hajer said he filmed Cantlie in Mosul in 2014, and he said that by then the British broadcaster was no longer wearing an orange jumpsuit or confined to a darkened room and was allowed to wander among the markets and streets of Mosul for camera crews.
“I cannot tell you whether he was coerced or threatened. He was walking freely,” Abu Hajer said, an assertion that is at odds with what is known about Cantlie’s captivity.
A video released in January shows Cantlie in multiple locations in Mosul, including one in which he is riding a motorcycle with an armed militant seated behind him. It was among his final appearances before the series was halted with no explanation or subsequent indication of Cantlie’s fate, although articles attributed to him have since appeared in Daesh’s magazine.
One of Abu Hajer’s next assignments took him to an elaborately staged scene of carnage, a mass execution-style killing choreographed for cameras in a way that has become a Daesh signature.
After arriving at the site, he said that he and the other camera operators gathered to “organise ourselves so that we wouldn’t all film [from] the same perspective.”
Abu Hajer said he had grave objections to what happened to the Syrian soldiers in the massacre that he filmed in the desert near Tabqa air base. But he acknowledged that his misgivings had more to do with how the soldiers were treated — and whether that comported with Islamic law — than any concern for their fates.
As the soldiers were stripped and marched into the desert, Abu Hajer said he filmed from the window of his car as an Egyptian assistant drove alongside the parade of condemned men.
“When the group stopped, I got out,” he said. “They were told to kneel down. Some soldiers got shot. Others were beheaded.” The video, still available online, shows multiple camera operators moving in and out of view as Daesh operatives fire hundreds of rounds.
“It wasn’t the killing of soldiers that I was against,” Abu Hajer said. “They were Syrian soldiers, Nusairis,” he said, referring to the religious sect to which Syrian President Bashar Al Assad and his closest supporters belong. “I thought they deserved to get shot.”
“What I didn’t like was that they were stripped to their underwear,” he said, an indignity that he considered an affront to Islamic law.
Abu Hajer also said he kept his lens aimed away from the beheadings because of his objections to the practice. But asked whether he considered refusing to record the massacre, he said he feared that would consign him to the fate of those he filmed.
“You don’t want to do it,” he said, “but you know that you cannot say, ‘No’.“
The contradictions of Daesh’s propaganda apparatus can make its structure and strategy seem incoherent.
The group exerts extraordinarily tight control over the production of its videos and messages but relies on the chaos of the internet and social media to disseminate them. Its releases cluster around seemingly incompatible themes: sometimes depicting the “caliphate” as a peaceful and idyllic domain, other times as a society awash in apocalyptic violence.
The dual messages are designed to influence a divided audience. The beheadings, immolations and other spectacles are employed both to menace Western adversaries and to appeal to disenfranchised Muslim males weighing a leap into the Islamist fray.
A separate collection depicts Daesh strongholds as a livable destination, a benevolent state committed to public works. Videos show the construction of public markets, smiling religious police on neighbourhood patrols and residents leisurely fishing on the banks of the Euphrates.
Even the concept of the “caliphate” has a dual aspect. The terrorist group’s rise is a result mainly of its demonstrated military power and the tangible territory it has seized. But a remarkable amount of its energy is devoted to creating an alternative, idealised version of itself online and shaping how that virtual empire is perceived.
That project has been entrusted to a media division that was operational well before the “caliphate” was formally declared in 2014. US intelligence officials said they have little insight into who controls Daesh’s propaganda strategy, although it is presumed to be led by Abu Mohammad Al Adnani, Daesh’s main spokesman.
The media wing has relied on veterans of Al Qaida media teams, young recruits fluent in social media platforms, and a bureaucratic discipline reminiscent of totalitarian regimes. Defectors and current members said that phones and cameras they brought to Syria were impounded upon arrival by Daesh operatives to prevent unauthorised and potentially unflattering images from finding their way online.
Only sanctioned crew members were allowed to carry cameras, and even they were to follow strict guidelines on the handling of their material. Once finished with a day’s shooting, the crews were to load their recordings on to laptops, transfer the footage to memory sticks, then deliver those to designated drop sites.
In a Daesh enclave near Aleppo, the media division’s headquarters was a two-storey home in a residential neighbourhood, defectors said. The site was protected by armed guards, and only those with permission from the regional emir were allowed to enter.
Each floor had four rooms packed with cameras, computers and other high-end equipment, said Abu Abdullah, 37, who made occasional visits to the site as a security and logistics operative. Internet access went through a Turkish wireless service.
The house served as an editorial office of Dabiq, Daesh’s glossy online magazine. Some also worked for Al Furqan, the terrorist group’s main media wing, which accounts for the majority of its videos and mass-audience statements.
Overall, there were more than 100 media operatives assigned to the unit, Abu Abdullah said. “Some of them were hackers; some were engineers.”
Abu Abdullah had no affiliation with the media arm, but he often did its bidding. At one point he was tapped to install a generator at the media headquarters so that it would not lose power when electricity went down.
Another assignment involved recovering corpses from battle scenes and arranging them to be photographed for propaganda videos exalting their sacrifice. He would wash away dried blood, lift the corners of dead fighters’ mouths into beatific smiles, and raise their index fingers in a gesture adopted by Daesh as a symbol of its cause.
Many were introduced to the Daesh through wrenching videos in which Mohammad Emwazi — a masked, knife-wielding militant with a British accent known as “Jihadi John” — slit the throats of Western hostages, including Americans James Foley and Steve Sotloff.
Scrutiny of those and other videos revealed an extraordinary level of choreography. Discrepancies among frames showed that scenes had been rehearsed and shot in multiple takes over many hours.
The releases showed professional-calibre attention to lighting, sound and camera positioning. Certain videos, including one showing a decapitated American Peter Kassig, appear to have employed special effects software to digitally impose images of Kassig and his killer against a dramatic backdrop.
Those production efforts were reserved for videos aimed at mass Western audiences and were addressed explicitly to US President Barack Obama. But defectors said that even internal events not intended for a global viewership were similarly staged.
Abu Abdullah said he had witnessed a public execution-style killing in the city of Bab in which a propaganda team presided over almost every detail. They brought a white board scrawled with Arabic script to serve as an off-camera cue card for the public official charged with reciting the condemned man’s alleged crimes. The hooded executioner raised and lowered his sword repeatedly so that crews could catch the blade from multiple angles.
The beheading took place only when the camera crew’s director said it was time to proceed. The execution wasn’t run by the executioner, Abu Abdullah said. “It’s the media guy who says when they are ready.”
For two decades, Al Qaida was the dominant brand. But Daesh has eclipsed it in the span of two years by turning the older network’s propaganda playbook on its head.
Al Qaida’s releases always exalted its leaders, particularly Osama Bin Laden. But Daesh’s propaganda is generally focused on its fighters and followers. Appearances by leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi or his senior lieutenants have been rare.
Rejecting the lecture format employed by Al Qaida, Daesh’s videos are cinematic, emphasising dramatic scenes, stylised transitions and special effects.
“The group is very image-conscious, much like a corporation,” said a US intelligence official involved in monitoring Daesh’s media operations. Its approach to building its brand is so disciplined, the official said, “that it’s very much like saying ‘This is Coca-Cola’ or ‘This is Nike’.”
The propaganda competition with Al Qaida is a high priority, defectors said. One former Daesh fighter said that he came under enormous pressure from the organisation after it learned that his father had been a high-ranking Al Qaida operative killed in Pakistan in a CIA drone strike.
Daesh media figures pushed the recruit to appear in a video renouncing his father’s organisation, said the son, who spoke on the condition that neither he nor his father be identified. His refusal, and reluctance to fight Al Qaida’s affiliate in Syria, damaged his standing in Daesh, and he said he fled in fear for his life.
Al Qaida has typically required extraordinary patience from its audience. Even its most media-savvy affiliate, the Al Qaida branch in Yemen, often takes months to release new issues of its online magazine, Inspire.
The frequency and volume of releases by Daesh are staggering by comparison. The group has produced hundreds of videos in more than a half-dozen languages, puts out daily radio broadcasts and garners as many as 2 million mentions per month on Twitter.
Twitter and Facebook have moved to shut down accounts associated with Daesh and ban the distribution of its messages, but users have found ways to resurface. Thousands of loyalists have also flocked to new services that are less vulnerable to government scrutiny, including Telegram, a messaging application created by a Russian software entrepreneur, although Telegram began shutting down Daesh channels after the Paris attacks.
The Islamic State has also exploited apparent connections to news organisations in the Middle East. In a comprehensive examination of the terrorist group’s media releases in the summer, Charlie Winter, until recently an analyst at the Quilliam Group in the United Kingdom, identified 1,146 distinct pieces of propaganda, including photos, videos and audio releases, during a single month-long stretch.
Winter counted as many as 36 separate media offices that answer to Daesh’s headquarters in Raqqa — including affiliates in Libya, Afghanistan and West Africa.
At one point during his study, on July 19, he noticed that every affiliate had simultaneously shifted to a new logo with the same stylised Arabic script. The icon appeared in the same location on every image and in the initial frame of every video release.
“There was clearly a communiqué issued,” Winter said in an interview. “The Islamic State is constantly striving to be as formalised, as bureaucratic-seeming as possible, to keep up the appearance of being a state.”
That effort to simulate legitimacy is particularly pervasive inside the “caliphate”.
The same videos employed to shock outsiders are used internally to cow the group’s less enthusiastic subjects. A constant stream of utopian messages is designed to convince residents, in Soviet-style fashion, of the superiority of Daesh.
While internet access is often restricted to the public, propaganda units set up giant viewing screens in neighbourhoods where residents come out in the evenings to watch approved videos streamed from laptops.
“It’s like a movie theatre,” said Abu Hourraira Al Maghribi, a 23-year-old with a shaved head who wore an Adidas hoodie when he met with reporters in prison. The videos are drawn from Daesh’s expanding film library, he said, depicting “daily life, [military] training and beheadings.”
The most notorious videos — including those showing the beheadings of Western hostages and the burning of a caged Jordanian fighter pilot — were shown over and over, he said, long after their audiences beyond the “caliphate” dissipated.
Abu Hourraira said he attended one screening on a street near the University of Mosul that attracted about 160 people, including at least 10 women and 15 children. One of the videos showed an execution by Emwazi, who is believed to have been killed this month in a US drone strike.
“The kids, they are not looking away — they are fascinated by it,” Abu Hourraira said. Jihadi John became a subject of such fascination that some children started to mimic his uniform, he said, wearing all “black and a belt with a little knife.”
Daesh maintains strict bureaucratic boundaries within its media wing. Camera crews were kept separate from the teams of producers and editors who stitched the raw footage together, adding titles, effects and soundtracks. Real names were almost never exchanged.
But Abu Hajer and two other defectors said that an American in his late 30s with white skin and dark-but-greying hair was a key player in some of Daesh’s most ambitious videos.
“The American does the editing,” Abu Hajer said, and was the creative force behind a 55-minute documentary called “Flames of War” that was released in late 2014. The film strives to create a mythology surrounding Daesh’s origin and connection to the historic “caliphate”.
It culminates with scenes of Syrian soldiers digging their own graves while a masked fighter, speaking English with a North American accent, warns that “the flames of war are only beginning to intensify.”
Another American-sounding figure surfaced more recently, delivering daily news broadcasts that appear to emanate from a radio station that Daesh overran last year in Mosul. After the attacks in Paris, his voice was the one that most English-speaking audiences heard describing France as “the capital of prostitution and vice” and warning that governments involved in strikes in Syria “will continue to be at the top of the target list.”
US officials said they have been unable to determine the identity of that speaker or others with North American accents. The militant who appeared in the “Flames of War” film remains the subject of an entry on the FBI’s website appealing to the public for help identifying him.
Daesh’s relentless media campaign has fuelled a global migration of militants. More than 30,000 foreign fighters from more than 115 countries have flooded into Syria since the start of that country’s civil war. At least a third arrived within the past year, the vast majority of them to join Daesh, according to US intelligence estimates.
Of the defectors interviewed, all but one said their decisions to leave for Syria could be traced to videos they saw online, or encounters on social media, that ignited an extremist impulse. The only outlier said that he had been prodded by a friend to come to Syria and was promptly imprisoned for refusing to fight.
Abu Hourraira, who spent months fighting in Iraq, said he began searching online for material about Daesh as the group began to dominate headlines about the war in Syria. He decided to abandon his job at a dry-cleaning business in Casablanca only after watching the group’s emotionally charged videos.
“Some were like Van Damme movies,” he said, referring to Jean-Claude Van Damme, the Hollywood action star. “You see these men fighting, and you want to be one of these brave heroes.”
Like many countries in the region, Morocco has struggled to offset that pull. Moroccan security officials said that more than 1,500 men had left the country to fight in Iraq and Syria, plus more than 500 women and children, many of them seeking to join their spouses, sons or fathers.
Several of the attackers in Paris, including the alleged architect, were of Moroccan descent, but were born and grew up in Europe.
“The fight now is with the propaganda because it plays a very big role in these numbers,” said a senior Moroccan security official who spoke on the condition that neither he nor his agency be identified. Al Qaida recruitment relied almost exclusively on direct contact in mosques or other settings, he said, but “now, 90 per cent are being recruited online.”
Defectors offered conflicting views on whether Daesh would endure. Some said that a cohort of young males in Iraq and Syria are already coming of age immersed in the group’s propaganda and ideology, and that a generation of children was being raised to idealise its masked militants.
But all attributed their decisions to leave Iraq and Syria to a combination of factors, including not only fears for their safety but also a disenchantment that set in when the reality of the “caliphate” failed to match the version they had encountered online.
Some said they were haunted by scenes of cruelty they saw firsthand but that Daesh propaganda teams edited out. Abu Abdullah, who wore a hood to disguise his identity during an interview, said he witnessed a mass killing near Aleppo in which Daesh fighters fired into a crowd of Alawites including women and children.
When a 10-year-old boy emerged alive, the highest-ranking militant on hand “pulled out a gun and shot him,” Abu Abdullah said. The slaying was recorded by the ever-present camera crews, he said, but the footage “was never aired.”
Abu Hajer, the former cameraman, said his standing with the group began to slip when he became involved in helping to administer Daesh’s religious courts. After sharing views that he said were at odds with his superiors, the perks of his media position were withdrawn.
“They took away my weapons, my monthly income,” as well as his villa and car, he said. A relative said that Abu Hajer finally pulled his family out of Syria after he had received a warning in which a Daesh militant dragged a finger across his throat.
A sympathetic colleague gave Abu Hajer the paperwork he needed to pass Daesh checkpoints on the way out of Syria, he said. Another friend gave him cash to put his family on a flight out of Turkey. Moroccan authorities were waiting for him at the Casablanca airport.
He now shares a crowded cell with other militants in a high-walled Moroccan prison, with two years remaining on a three-year sentence. Asked whether he worries that his work will induce others to join Daesh, he gave an equivocal answer. “To a certain extent I feel responsible,” he said. “But I am not the main reason.”
His videos continue to circulate online.
–Washington Post
