How the Islamic State radicalizes people today

The Islamic State group has lost thousands of fighters to death or prison and suffered the demise of its self-declared caliphate in Iraq and Syria. But the global reach of the group, also known as ISIS, is still vast, in part because of its sophisticated media output and the people around the world who consume it.

On New Year’s Day, a man with an Islamic State group flag killed at least 14 people when he drove into a crowd in New Orleans. Authorities say there was no evidence that the man, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, had active connections to the terrorist group. But the FBI said “he was 100% inspired by ISIS.”

It is not yet clear which specific online content Jabbar may have seen or how else he may have been radicalized. Experts noted that the placement of the flag on the truck resembled one depicted by the Islamic State group in a media campaign urging followers to “run them over without mercy.” And, authorities said, he posted several videos to his Facebook account before his attack in which he pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group.

From online videos to social media platforms — and even a weekly Islamic State group newsletter — the group that wants to force all Muslims to adhere strictly to the faith’s earliest teachings has a very modern media strategy.

“Terrorism is essentially communications,” said Hans-Jakob Schindler, a former United Nations diplomat who is the senior director of the Counter Extremism Project, a think tank with offices in New York and Berlin. “It is not warfare, because obviously, ISIS cannot militarily defeat the West, right? They tried, and it didn’t exactly end well.”

How did the Islamic State group keep its influence alive? In part, by transforming its movement into a global franchise beyond the Middle East, with active chapters in Afghanistan, Somalia, Mali, Congo, the Caucuses and Turkey, among other places.

But the glue that holds the disparate branches together — and also helps to inspire “lone wolf” terrorists such as Jabbar who carry out their own attacks — is the Islamic State group’s sophisticated media operation. Experts say that although it is doubtful that the media operation has a physical headquarters, it is highly centralized and controlled by its media directorate. Much of its output appears to come from affiliates in Africa, which have recently been the most active in terms of attacks.

The group also puts out an online weekly newsletter called Al Naba, or the News, which contains details of the group’s latest exploits, implicitly encouraging followers to commit acts of violence.

“The Al Naba newsletter comes out like clockwork every Thursday, which is one of the more impressive things that the group is able to do,” said Cole Bunzel, a scholar of militant Islam in the Middle East at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in California.

“They have an editorial; they cover the different provinces, as they’re called; they cover attacks from that week. They tally up the number of attacks and casualties that they claim. And that’s the main way that they stay connected with their global support base,” he said.

The most recent edition of the newsletter, published Thursday, did not mention the New Orleans attack, and the Islamic State group has not claimed responsibility for it.

Al Naba was initially published through the messaging app Telegram and other platforms, constantly adapting as different channels were shut down, said Aaron Zelin, a Washington Institute fellow who has tracked the activities and propaganda of Islamist groups for more than 15 years.

Supporters of the group have also disseminated messages on Twitter, Facebook pages and other social media platforms, according to researchers. When their user profiles are blocked, they often just create new ones. The Islamic State group has used decentralized internet tools that are harder to shut down and moved some of its messaging to the dark web, Zelin said.

Terrorism analysts say it has been easy for extremists to connect with potential supporters on social media because of the lack of effort by some of the companies that operate the platforms and by governments to force a crackdown.

Schindler said that, in light of the New Orleans attack, both political parties should ask: “Why is this massive industry with these profits not helping our security services to prevent such attacks? Why do we not get a tip, as we do from the banks and every financial institution in North America and worldwide, that there is a terrorist here, or a tip that there’s a radicalization process going on?”

Terrorism experts say the Islamic State group’s mastery of media and message is a key to its success. Al-Qaida, which the Islamic State group split from in 2013, laid the groundwork, publishing online and print magazines and producing videos as well as social media.

Last January, the extremist group revived a campaign directed at its global adherents: “kill them wherever you find them,” a reference to a verse in the Quran.

The idea, which first surfaced in 2015, was to encourage would-be followers to commit acts of jihad at home rather than traveling to Iraq and Syria. That notion became even more important once the caliphate was defeated.

During the period when the Islamic State group held ground in Syria and then Iraq (2013-17) and was eager to gain adherents in the West, it was notorious for posting grisly depictions of violence, such as the beheading of photojournalist James Wright Foley.

Now, experts say an increasingly daunting challenge is that social media platforms are doing much of the work of spreading the Islamic State group’s message, as algorithms that seek to boost engagement take some users deeper and deeper into the extremist worldview.

“Terror groups don’t have to make a ton of effort to radicalize people anymore; the algorithm does it for them,” Schindler said. “The point of the algorithm is to keep the user on the platform, to give them what they like, and if this happens to be Islamic extremism or if you are in the radicalization process, your worldview shifts.”

In Syria, where the Islamic State group took advantage of a long civil war to seize a large swath of territory, only to lose it eventually to U.S.-backed fighters, the group has begun to rebound, accelerating its attacks. That trend might continue, because the regime of President Bashar Assad was suddenly toppled in December by another extremist group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which was once associated with the Islamic State group and al-Qaida.

The situation is still fluid, but some analysts fear that the Islamic State group could regain ground amid the chaos. The group’s newsletter has spoken dismissively of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham as “jihadists turned politicians,” but has not called for attacks on them.

Meanwhile, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and other rebel groups say they should take over the role of guarding Islamic State group prisoners in eastern Syria and manage the camps holding about 40,000 Islamic State group fighters and family members — a job that has been done for nearly five years by the Kurdish-led Syrian Defense Forces, backed by the United States. Many terrorism experts question how Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which once had links to the Islamic State group but then bitterly separated, might carry out the mission of suppressing it.

The Islamic State group recently renewed its “Breaking the Walls” media campaign, which encourages the imprisoned fighters to break out of the jails in eastern Syria and free their families.

If that succeeds, Zelin said, it would be a “disaster.”