Tweets His Own?

According to the U.S. Department of State, the Islamic State is releasing up to 90,000 Tweets per day. But that number apparently doesn’t account for the pro-ISIS Tweets that also emanate from other sources in the ether. “J.M. Berger is a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution who recently testified before the Foreign Affairs Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives about terrorists’ use of social media. With funding from Google, Berger and his technologist colleague Jonathon Morgan set up a system to capture the scope of pro-ISIS messaging.

“They found that in the fall of 2014, there were at least 45,000 Twitter accounts used by ISIS supporters. With that as a starting point, Berger told PunditFact that 90,000 messages a day is likely a conservative number… ‘My best estimate is something over 200,000 a day, including retweets, but that comes with a lot of caveats,’ Berger said… Berger said the figure includes supporters as well as actual members of ISIS in Iraq and Syria.” Polifact.com, February 19^th.

Here are the basics of just one of many such ISIS Twitter-sources: “One of ISIS's more successful ventures is an Arabic-language Twitter app called The Dawn of Glad Tidings, or just Dawn. The app, an official ISIS product promoted by its top users, is advertised as a way to keep up on the latest news about the jihadi group.

“Hundreds of users have signed up for the app on the web or on their Android phones through the Google Play store. When you download the app, ISIS asks for a fair amount of personal data… Once you sign up, the app will post tweets to your account—the content of which is decided by someone in ISIS’s social-media operation. The tweets include links, hashtags, and images, and the same content is also tweeted by the accounts of everyone else who has signed up for the app, spaced out to avoid triggering Twitter’s spam-detection algorithms. Your Twitter account functions normally the rest of the time, allowing you to go about your business.” TheAtlantic.com, June 16^th.

Indeed, as President Obama addresses this onslaught, there is a double-edge sword to curtailing this malignant verbiage. We really get a great deal of intelligence from these emissions, are able to identify elements in the ISIS power structure and understand strategies and targets better. On the other hand, IS’ use of social media has been one of the most productive recruiting tools, one that has generated one of the most effective fighting machines in the Middle East. Zealots with no rules against infidels, armed with astounding levels of captured weapons, and awash in cash.

Cash? From oil generated in captured territory. From banks in captured and looted cities and towns. From ransoms quietly paid for captured foreigners. And most recently revealed and despicably endured, from “harvested” organs removed (presumably before or immediately after execution of their captives) and sold into the illicit medical marketplace.

But ISIS’ recruitment of young bodies to fight, suicide-bomb and develop sleeper cells all over the world seems to outweigh the loss of potential intelligence. “The Obama administration has a plan to fight back against ISIS propaganda, and it involves what the New York Times calls a ‘tiny State Department agency.’ The Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, created in 2011, has always been tasked with coordinating ‘countermessaging’ against extremists, but now it will be expanded, thanks to ISIS. ‘We're getting beaten on volume,’ a department official says. But ‘these guys aren't BuzzFeed; they're not invincible in social media.’” Newswer.com, February 17^th.

Even as Turkey and the United States have agreed to a joint training program to prepare moderate Syrian rebels to join the fights (which Turkey would prefer be directed at the downfall of the Assad regime), countries all around the world are trying to stem the tide of ISIS to recruit their citizens into this malevolent battle. At a White House conference on extremism, “President Obama on [February 19^th] described the fight against violent extremism as a ‘generational challenge’ that would require the cooperation of governments, religious leaders, educators and law enforcement. But even before he called on more than 60 nations to join the effort, the rise of the Islamic State and the attacks by homegrown terrorists in Paris, Ottawa, Copenhagen and Sydney, Australia, had jolted American Muslims into action.” New York Times, February 19^th.

ISIS’ reach into nations around the world, even here in the United States, has shocked devoted Muslims to this vile infiltration of even their own local communities. The vast majority of ISIS victims are indeed other Muslims, and Islamic clerics have begun to attempt to defuse ISIS’ efforts to recruit and radicalize age-appropriate Muslims into this morbid fight.

In the United States, “Muslim leaders … have already started organizing or expanding prevention programs and discussions on countering violent extremism, often with assistance from law enforcement officials and trained counter-recruiters who emphasize that the Internet’s dangers for young Muslims now go far beyond pornography.

“With the Islamic State in particular deploying savvy online appeals to adolescents alongside videos of horrific executions, the sense of urgency has grown. Though some Muslim leaders still resist cooperating with the government, fearing that they would be contributing to religious profiling and anti-Muslim bigotry, many have been spurred to respond as they have come into contact with religiously ardent youths who feel alienated by life in the West and admit that they have been vulnerable to the Islamic State’s invitation to help build a puritanical utopia.

“‘The number is small, but one person who gets radicalized is one too many,’ said Rizwan Jaka, a father of six and the board chairman of the All Dulles Area Muslim Society, where Imam Magid [a respected, Virginia-based, Islamic ‘scholar bursting with charm and authority’] is the spiritual leader. ‘It’s a balancing act: We have to make sure our youth are not stereotyped in any way, but we’re still dealing with the real issue of insulating them from any potential threat of radicalization.’” New York Times, February 16^th.

While the numbers of actual recruits from the United States remains fairly small (estimated at 150 to date), the fact that it is happening at all is beyond disturbing. The risks of such pro-ISIS feelings also generate fears of sleeper cells growing here, waiting for the right moment to explode. And of course, there is always the risk of a “lone wolf” – inspired by ISIS but never formally joining the actual war in the Middle East – taking the mission of destruction as a personal obligation. France estimates that ISIS has generated 1,000 recruits from that nation, and the United Kingdom, 600.

I’ve blogged before that nothing short of a massive ground assault against ISIS is likely to extinguish this smoldering tumor, but we have yet to identify truly viable sources of such ground forces ready to fight anytime soon. Just shutting down Twitter sites and providing counter-information may be a reasonable governmental goal, but we need so much more in terms of upgrading the weapons available to the forces that really can counter ISIS – yet risking the chronic American disease of blowback – and perhaps even face the harsh reality of joining in a new multinational force (perhaps this is not an effort we should lead or organize) to destroy ISIS where it stands… on the ground.

I’m Peter Dekom, and while this cannot be a United States-led mission in yet another Middle Eastern war, what the world has done so far to counter ISIS has been entirely inadequate.