WASHINGTON—Author Haroon Ullah pulled back the curtain on Islamist cyber recruitment as he discussed his new book, Digital World War: Islamists, Extremists, and the Fight for Cyber Supremacy, at The Heritage Foundation on Wednesday.
Currently a chief strategy officer at the Broadcasting Board of Governors, Georgetown University instructor, and term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Ullah said the information battlefield is not well understood. As an evolving and ever-changing recruitment tool for the likes of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), he wanted to better understand these tools and how they’ve captivated so many individuals.
“Audience segmentation matters,” Ullah said. “We’re in a content war. … They really understand the, what I would say, ‘customer journey.’”
Conducting interviews for the book, he made a stark discovery. When asking for a one-word identification of ISIS, he was expecting a young defector to use terms like “horrendous, horrific, or murderers.” What he heard, however, were terms such as “identity, belonging, trust.”
Also, the propaganda an individual might hear in the United States may be quite different from that heard overseas.
Language Barrier
“I realized that they were saying one thing in Arabic, and they’re saying something very different in English,” Ullah said. “We read a lot of the ISIS material in English, and doing my research I found that English is not even in the top five languages … in terms of what they’re producing—both on social media and other ways.”
When reading messages in Arabic, he said about 80 percent of the material is actually positive, such as discussions of government issues or fighting corruption. “They’re offering a narrative that’s aspirational for young people in terms of their identity,” Ullah said.
He also noted the Islamist propagandists see bigger impact with narrow, niche audiences.
“I wanted to think carefully about what are the reasons that young people are attracted to this type of propaganda, and what are the things that really sort of make somebody get up and either buy a ticket or join or online in a way I call ‘fanboys’ support their ecosystem,” he said.
But who are the “key influencers”? Ullah said one name that continued to emerge from interviews was Mohammed al-Arefe.
“Mohammed al-Arefe is the most popular person in the Middle East on Twitter,” he said. “He’s an extremist cleric based in Saudi Arabia, and he has over 20 million followers on Twitter.”
Ullah said this cleric is a big influencer when it comes to young people packing for places like Syria and Iraq. In Saudi Arabia, more than 30 percent of youth follow al-Arefe, but his influence extends around the world, he added.
‘Speed Kills’
One thing that ISIS and other extremist groups are is market savvy and fast. They try different approaches and can turn on a dime, Ullah noted, always perfecting their message.
Although he said it varies, extremists are putting out about 5,000 items on social media each day. And at its height, that total was up to 35,000, Ullah said.
To add to the complexity, he said ISIS is adept at moving between open-source and closed platforms.
Ullah said hearing about physical battlefield success in the fight against extremists is great, but the cyber battlefield in which they operate and recruit is boundless.
“What we didn’t recognize is that on the battlefield that I think they care most about, they’ve made unexpected gains,” Ullah said.
Solution Searching
Fighting the cyber war of words is a difficult task, and one with a number of pitfalls. In particular, Ullah warned against what he calls the “backfire effect.”
In the course of countering an idea or thought expressed by the caliphate, he said there’s always a threat that the pushback will amplify a message extremists want to get out rather than counter it. As such, Ullah said finding alternative approaches to countering the extremist narrative is crucial.
He said the approach today is similar to a counterinsurgency, but a better approach might be addressing the problem as one would a public health issue.
“If you think about ISIS and the way it spreads, it models what we see in the spread of herpes, for example,” he said. “It spreads through intimate close contact.”
Ullah emphasized that the radicalization of many fighters is local. For example, he said, 80 percent of Tunisian foreign fighters actually came from a single neighborhood in Tunis. And in Belgium, the majority came from a single southern Brussels neighborhood.
To combat this ever-evolving threat, Ullah said the way to combat extremists on the information battlefield would be through a “Manhattan Project” type of initiative that harnesses not only resources and efforts of the best minds, but looks at them in this new light of “public health” in addition to ongoing efforts that have been quite successful on the physical battlefield. At its core is a better understanding of how extremists continue to capitalize on social media innovation, while learning to pivot and adjust to keep up with their ever- evolving recruitment tactics in the Middle East and around the globe.
The book is available on Kindle and in hard copy.
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