Daesh winning social media campaign, US admits

Washington: An internal State Department assessment paints a dismal picture of the efforts by the Obama administration and its foreign allies to combat Daesh’s propaganda machine, portraying a fractured coalition that cannot get its own message straight.

The assessment comes months after the State Department signalled that it was planning to energise its social media campaign against the militant group. It concludes, however, that Daesh’s violent narrative — promulgated through thousands of messages each day — has effectively “trumped” the efforts of some of the world’s richest and most technologically advanced nations.

It also casts an unflattering light on internal discussions between American officials and some of their closest allies in the military campaign against the militants. A “messaging working group” of officials from the United States, Britain and a Gulf country, the memo says, “has not really come together.”

“The working group structure is confusing,” the memo says. “When we convened meetings with our counterparts, I am certain we all heard about various initiatives for the first time.”

The blunt assessment comes amid broader criticism that the military campaign against Daesh is flagging. The militants recently took over the city of Ramadi in western Iraq and have occupied Fallujah and Mosul for more than a year.

State Department officials have repeatedly said that “countermessaging” the Daesh is one of the pillars of the strategy to defeat the group. But Obama administration officials have acknowledged in the past that the group is far more nimble in spreading its message than the United States is in blunting it.

The internal document — composed by Richard A. Stengel, the US State Department’s undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs and a former managing editor of Time magazine — was written for Secretary of State John Kerry after a conference of Western and Arab officials in Paris this month on countering the Daesh.

A communique issued at the meeting took note of the Daesh’s gains and expressed the coalition’s determination to remove the group from the territory it held in Iraq and Syria. The document was issued in the name of Kerry, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius of France and Prime Minister Haider Al Abadi of Iraq. Kerry was in Boston recuperating from a broken leg, but he spoke to the meeting by phone.

Stengel noted that the message from the conference — that a disparate coalition of nations was resolute in destroying the Daesh — fell flat, with news media reports highlighting how little of substance seemed to emerge from the meeting.

“From the outside, it mostly seemed exactly like business as usual,” he wrote.

The memo, labeled “sensitive but unclassified,” was given to The New York Times by an Obama administration official.

Stengel did not respond to a request for comment. John Kirby, the State Department spokesperson, said the memo “acknowledges what we’ve made clear in the past: We must do a better job at discrediting Isil in the information space.” He was using an acronym for an alternate name for the militant group.

“The memo is an assessment not of the larger counter-Isil messaging effort, but how the small group of coalition members communicates internally and externally,” Kirby said, adding Kerry would “take into consideration” Stengel’s ideas and recommendations.

This year, US administration officials said they planned to expand the State Department’s Centre for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, a tiny office created in 2011 to combat terrorist messages on the internet in real time. The centre employs specialists fluent in Arabic, Urdu, Punjabi and Somali to counter terrorist propaganda and misinformation, offering a competing narrative that seeks to strike an emotional chord. The analysts also post messages on English-language websites that militants use to recruit, raise money and promote their cause.

But Stengel’s assessment makes clear that US officials believe that much more needs to be done.

In the memo, he proposes to Kerry that a “communications hub” be created somewhere in the Middle East — staffed by representatives from the various coalition members — that would perform “daily and weekly messaging around coalition activities” to fight Daesh, and that would have a spokesperson in Baghdad.