ABU DHABI: The Sawab Centre, a joint UAE-US initiative to combat Daesh’s online propaganda and promote positive alternatives to extremism, has announced the launch of a social media campaign to highlight post-Daesh stabilisation, reconstruction, and reconciliation initiatives.
Under the hashtag “#AfterDaesh”, the three-day campaign will run till Thursday in both Arabic and English on Sawab’s Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube platforms.
As exposed in previous Sawab campaigns, Daesh’s brutal assault on human values and civilisation has negatively impacted great numbers of individuals, families, and communities throughout the world, particularly in the area it occupied in Syria and Iraq. Motivated by a violent and depraved ideology, Daesh is directly responsible for murdering scores of innocent people, tearing thousands of families apart and displacing them into camps and across national borders, enslavement and trafficking in women, and destroying cultural heritage sites and priceless antiquities.
However, as Daesh continues to surrender land in Syria and Iraq, there are increasingly more and more hopeful scenes of return, resilience, and reconstruction in the terrorist group’s former strongholds. Whether it is schools reopening in liberated areas of Iraq or families reuniting after years of separation, signs of life are returning to these previously occupied areas. Ordinary citizens are mobilising to bring their communities back to life by rebuilding houses or cleaning up their towns of the rubble left behind by fleeing Daesh fighters.
The campaign will also focus on the Global Coalition Against Daesh’s significant contributions to stabilising liberated areas and reversing the destructive legacy of Daesh. Through constructing wells to provide potable water, launching de-mining initiatives, or inoculating children against infectious diseases, coalition efforts are making tangible differences in the communities previously ravaged by Daesh brutality.
#AfterDaesh is the Sawab Centre’s 15th proactive social media campaign. 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.
