ISIS Shifts Its Social-Media Patterns

The latest round of propaganda videos released by the Islamic State suggest the terrorist group is altering its media approach to directly counter what the mainstream Western media is saying about it.  

The two most recently released videos both feature British hostage John Cantlie, a captive journalist who has been used by ISIS as a spokesperson of sorts during the last month of his captivity. The first was the latest release of a propaganda video series called "Lend Me Your Ears."

In the most recent installment of this series, Cantlie reads a script that directly addresses a number of details reported by The New York Times in its Sunday cover story, "The Horror Before the Beheadings," as well as older news stories.

Award-winning reporter Rukmini Callimachi researched the piece for several months, interviewing former ISIS hostages and their families to paint a picture of what life is like for those who have been captured and released or killed by the group. It revealed many new details about the captivity and deaths of American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, and British aid worker Alan Henning, who were all beheading victims of ISIS.

Callimachi reported that Foley, the first of the hostages to be publicly beheaded, was treated extremely harshly: He suffered waterboarding, beating, starvation, interrogation, and unspeakable torture, primarily due to his connection to the American military through relatives, as well as his work as a journalist.

In the video, ISIS admits to torture, but blames the hostages and their governments for the abuse. "Now, unless we tried something stupid like escaping or doing something we shouldn't, we were treated well by the Islamic State," says Cantlie in the ISIS directed video. "Some of us who tried to escape were waterboarded by our captors, as Muslim prisoners are waterboarded by their American captors."

Cantlie also comments on the very few comforts the captives had, as reported by the Times, such as playing chess using pieces drawn on scrap paper and reenacting movies. "Our strange little community of prisoners had its share of problems, but apart from the odd fight, we lived together in relative harmony through uncertain times. We read books, played recreational games, and gave lectures on our specialist subjects. It wasn't a bad life." The fights, lectures, and games were all explicitly mentioned in the Times article as methods the prisoners developed to cope with their long captivity.

Callimachi connected her interviews and various other media reports to determine that, at this time, ISIS has only three hostages remaining: two Americans, Peter Kassig, and an unidentified woman, as well as John Cantlie.

The video also address another major news report, dating back to early September. In an interview with ABC News, the Foley family said they felt threatened by members of the United States government to not cooperate with any of the ISIS demands, particularly the ransom payment. In Cantlie's message, he reads from two particular email exchanges, both from relatives of the American hostages. (It is unspecified if they are from the Sotloff or Foley family, who were both in contact with the group.) The messages, which have not been independently confirmed, were as follows:

17th of July 2014:

Our government is not being helpful. We have begged them so many times already. Everyone has buried their heads in the sand. We feel we are caught in the middle between you and the U.S. government, and we are being punished. We have reached out to our government, but they have been non-responsive for some time now.

24th of July 2014:

We are contacting people everyday. You've given us a huge mountain to climb, and we feel like a pawn in this political battle that we've been forced into. I'm taking everything you have said seriously, and I'm working as fast as I can. I need more time.

Cantlie then confirms reports dating back to late August that ISIS had wanted to trade Foley for the release of Dr. Aafia Siddique, "Lady al-Qaeda," and that the United States government had rejected this request. Siddique was accused of plotting numerous attacks against the U.S. and conspiring with high-ranking al-Qaeda members. She is currently serving a 86-year sentence in a U.S. prison for attempting to kill a U.S. Army captain.

In a second video, released on Monday, Cantlie appears in the city of Kobani, wearing regular street clothes. In past videos, ISIS dressed their hostages in orange robes and plastic slippers (which The Times discovered are tragically shared by hostages, dead and alive). However, in this video, Cantlie is seen in street attire, with a manicured beard and hands unbound. In this propaganda video, he denies claims that ISIS is being pushed out of Kobani by Kurdish or American forces. (In reality, ISIS has been unsuccessful in attempts to take Kobani.)  

This video also indicates another change for ISIS. It has been 24 days since Alan Henning's execution video became public, and Peter Kassig was threatened to be the next victim. However, these new videos give no information on Kassig's status. The other beheading videos were all released about two weeks apart. A number of calls have been made to spare Kassig's life—he is an aid worker and devout Muslim. Even Abu Omar Aqidi, a high ranking official in the al-Qaeda sect Jabhat al-Nusra, has called for his release. ISIS is known for its well-organized social media activity, yet it seems to be slowly changing patterns.

Source : CLICK

Read More

The (Mistaken) Complacency on ISIS in Central Europe

By Kacper Rękawek

European Security and Defence Economics Project Analyst at the Polish Institute of International Affairs

Thursday 2 October 2014

As the next atrocities committed by the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) are revealed in both Iraq and Syria, an international coalition to battle this organisation has launched its activities, with bombings of jihadist targets in Syria capturing most of the attention. While watching these events, a casual observer could assume that the coalition is made up of a representative combination of NATO/EU allies and a string of Middle Eastern states. However, this is not exactly true. Central European countries, i.e. some post-communist NATO and EU member states, are less than enthusiastic about this coalition. More fundamentally, they struggle with the understanding and assessment of the threat posed to the international order by ISIS. Below are five false contextualised assumptions which dominate the Central European narrative on the world’s most popular jihadist organisation.

ISIS will not come to our neighbourhood because it is ‘calm’. Counter-terrorism officials and practitioners from the region always stress that their part of Europe is not directly threatened by terrorism. Theoretically, they could not be more right – just one look at the Europol data on terrorism provides backing for their statements on the ‘safety’ of their countries, as there are hardly any reports on terrorist activity within their borders. The trouble, however, is that this is mostly seen as a result of the low numbers of Muslims in Central Europe, i.e. an insignificant potential recruitment base for Islamist terrorists. This fact only strengthens the region’s conviction about its peripheral nature and, in contrast to Western Europe, alleged diminished attractiveness to terrorism. However, one need only look at the example of Finland, another ‘calm’ country and a seemingly off-beaten track location, which provided one of the largest European contingents of foreign fighters travelling to Syria (proportionally to its population size), to question this narrative.

ISIS is not plotting against us so it is not the priority. ISIS is unlikely to put into motion an elaborate terrorist plot against Central Europe. Still, the U.S. and the UK treat this organisation’s potential with growing concern not only because of their strategic interests in the Middle East, but also because of the fate of the American and British hostages held or executed by this organisation, which made front page news all over the world. Central European states (e.g. Poland, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary) also had their citizens kidnapped in Syria and in other global hot spots (Pakistan, Sudan, Lebanon, Iraq). If ISIS captures hostages from Central Europe, the ‘ISIS is not our priority’ attitude could overnight evolve into a crisis fuelled by the need to secure the release of the captives.

ISIS is full of foreign fighters but they are not ours. True, hardly any of the ISIS foreign recruits so far come from Central Europe – even though there are rumours of individual Polish, Romanian and Slovak fighters. Again, the low number of the potential recruitment base is the most likely reason for this state of affairs. However, it would be foolhardy to end consideration of the matter there. The region has extensive historical experience with the phenomenon of foreign fighters. Poland’s motto ‘for our freedom and yours’ and the fact that its national anthem is basically a song by 18th century foreign fighters (Poles in Italy) is a testament to this. Hence, it is not that Central Europeans are generally less likely to fight in foreign conflicts. They might do so in the future (again) and it would be prudent for the countries of the region to prepare for such an eventuality and study the recent experiences of their Western peers in preventing and fighting radicalization.

ISIS is far away. ISIS runs a statelet-like entity on NATO’s South-Eastern borders, i.e. relatively far from Central Europe. It might, however, be poised to directly challenge Turkey. Most of the Central Europeans support NATO as an organisation focusing on territorial defence, but how would they respond if it is not Russia, but ISIS which threatens the territories of NATO, using similar tactics of hybrid warfare? These questions are hardly asked in Central Europe but may need to be mulled over in the coming months, as the Central Europeans could be confronted more directly with the security implications of challenges faced by their Southern and Western allies.

We have no capabilities to offer in the fight against ISIS. George W. Bush once remarked that anyone can offer something to the coalition on the global war on terror. Surprisingly, this statement still stands as the anti-ISIS coalition goes into action. No one is asking the Central European air forces to assist in the bombings of ISIS and al-Nusra targets in Syria. But they could still consider going beyond their purely political support for U.S. actions in the region. Simply showing more concern and interest, e.g. by sending a delegation to the recent Paris conference on Iraq (the Czech Republic was the only country in the region to do so), would constitute a meaningful beginning. This could also dispel the widely held notion in Western Europe that the countries of the region are almost solely looking at the east while assessing threats to their security. More engagement in the south would also strengthen the case for expecting their Western allies to reassure them in the face of threats emanating from their immediate Eastern neighbourhood.

Central Europe is definitely not threatened directly by ISIS. Nonetheless, the security assessment must go beyond this, especially if our partners are concerned about some of their compatriots fighting in ISIS ranks in Syria or Iraq. Central Europeans could learn from their Western peers and prepare for the emergence of their own terrorist problems or the return of the foreign fighter phenomenon to their region. Simultaneously, showing more interest and involvement in combating threats on NATO’s South-Eastern flank might prove beneficial in calling for more understanding of their own regional woes.

Read More