Abu Dhabi: The Sawab Centre, a joint UAE-US initiative to combat Daesh’s online propaganda and promote positive alternatives to extremism, announced the launch of a social media campaign to highlight Daesh’s myriad atrocities and crimes against humanity.

The campaign will also focus on the Global Coalition Against Daesh’s significant progress in eroding the terrorist group’s military and economic capabilities, stabilising liberated areas, and reversing the legacy of Daesh’s destructive actions and ideology.

The three-day campaign will be conducted in Arabic and English on Sawab’s Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube platforms and will employ the hashtag “#DaeshRuin.”

Daesh preys on vulnerable youth around the world to isolate them from their families and recruit them into its depraved enterprise. In areas under its control, the terrorist group routinely kidnaps, enslaves, and trafficks women and young girls and brainwashes young boys into becoming cannon fodder and suicide bombers. In the wake of Daesh violence and devastation, thousands of families have been torn apart and displaced in camps and even across national borders.

As part of its misguided assault on civilisation, Daesh has defaced or substantially destroyed several important cultural heritage sites in Syria and Iraq, including Palmyra and Nimrud. Daesh also loots these same sites and illicitly trade in historical antiquities, including priceless works dating back to centuries, to fund its nefarious activities.

Daesh persecutes all those who do not conform to its world view, and has destroyed scores of mosques, churches, and other places of worship, even striking at the Prophet’s Mosque in Madinah during Eid Al Fitr prayers.

The Global Coalition is successfully driving Daesh militants from the group’s former strongholds and crippling their capacity to wage terror and sow destruction. Daesh has lost 61 per cent of the populated territory it once held in Iraq and 28 per cent of what it once held in Syria. Global efforts are also succeeding in significantly limiting Daesh’s recruitment of new terrorist fighters, weakening its economic infrastructure including its generation of oil revenue, and countering its propaganda and corrupt ideology.

Other Sawab campaigns have focused on the terrorist group’s enslavement of women and children, the importance of diversity to a well-functioning society, and the positive impact that youth can have on their communities.

Since its launch in July 2015, the Sawab Centre has encouraged governments, communities, and individual voices to engage proactively to counteract online extremism. Over this time, the centre has given voice to the millions of people around the world who oppose Daesh and support the centre’s efforts to expose the terrorist group’s brutality and criminal nature.