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The resistance facing Islamic State's online propaganda machine is well-documented — with tech giants like Apple, Twitter, and Facebook all attempting to suppress the influence of the jihdaist group. But away from the internet, the terror group's media project is organised, far-reaching, and showing no signs of dwindling.
In an article published on Sunday on the Lawfare blog, senior communications researcher Charlie Winter says the West's fixation with the Islamic State's online presence has meant the success of the group's offline propaganda has gone almost unnoticed.
Winter, a senior research associate at Georgia State University who specialises in the strategies of international jihadist movements, explained how ISIS (or IS, ISIL, and Daesh) uses radio and the printing press to disseminate messages across its territories on a daily basis. Business Insider's Pamela Engel has previously written about how ISIS' brainwashes those living under its rule.
Speaking about the extremist group's "formidable" offline communications effort, Winter wrote:
Night and day, the al-Bayan Radio station broadcasts its programs on shortwave frequencies from central Libya to eastern Iraq, with programs ranging from news bulletins and 'history lessons' to on-air fatwas and call-in medical clinics. The formerly-annual al-Naba’ newsletter has metamorphosed into a weekly newspaper issued on Saturdays, complete with exclusive interviews, opinion pieces, and infographics.
According to Winter, recent reports of falling fighter numbers and the group's finances being strained have created the notion that ISIS is in a process of regression. While in the the group's heartland in Syria and Iraq its media machine is flourishing and showing no signs of decline.
Now, for the most part, the common conception is not that the caliphate is in ascendancy, but that it is on a downward – albeit dangerous – trajectory. In the territories that the Islamic State holds dear, though, the story is very different. In these places – its propaganda narrative more pervasive – the situation is borne of an offline media strategy that has, for a long time, been almost totally obscured by the world’s fixation on its online equivalent.
In provinces controlled by the Islamic fundamentalists, a network of "media points" have been created where IS-approved content can be seen or even downloaded — such as literature, images of "paradise" and video clips showing the gore of warfare.
In a recent edition of the group's official Al-Naba newsletter, it is claimed the media point experiment began as a lowly shack in northern Syria, but now accounts for over 60 booths in the Nineveh Province, with at least 25 in the city of Mosul alone.
Islamic State has lost several key personnel in recent months, including its "minister of war," Omar al-Shishani and Abd al-Rahman Mustafa al-Qaduli, who was described as ISIS’ No. 2 leader.