The Jihadis Return: Isis and the New Sunni Uprising (7 page)

In reality, war isn’t much foggier than peace, sometimes less so. Serious developments are difficult to hide because thousands are affected by them. And once the fighting has started, the authorities become increasingly less able to monitor and impede an enterprising journalist’s movements. Secrets about who holds what territory and who is winning and losing become difficult to keep. Informants become easier to find. In times of danger, whether in Belfast, Basra, or Damascus, people become acutely aware of any potential threat to their neighborhood: it can be as small as a new face or as large as the arrival of a military unit. A government or an army can try to maintain secrecy by banning reporters but they will pay the price as the vacuum of news is filled with information supplied by their enemies. The Syrian government put itself at a political disadvantage by denying visas to most foreign journalists, a policy it has only recently begun to reverse.

As the danger increased in Iraq after 2003, a rumor spread that foreign reporters weren’t really eyewitnesses because they had been reduced to producing “hotel journalism,” never leaving three or four well-fortified hotels. This was never true, quite apart from the fact that these hotels were repeatedly targeted by suicide bombers. Journalists who were frightened of leaving their hotel took the sensible precaution of not going to Baghdad in the first place. I used to think that the reporters most likely to be killed or kidnapped were the inexperienced ones who were trying to make a name for themselves by taking outrageous risks. But the war reporters I knew best who died, such as David Blundy in El Salvador in 1989 and Marie Colvin in Syria in 2012, were highly experienced. Their only mistake was to go to dangerous places so frequently that there was a high chance that they would one day be hit by a bullet or a bomb.

Messy guerrilla fighting and sporadic artillery bombardments in wars with no clear frontlines are particularly dangerous. In 2004, I was nearly killed outside Kufa on the Euphrates by Shia militiamen who had been rattled by fighting with US marines earlier in the day. Suspicious of the local headdress I was wearing, they half-decided I was a spy. But I had put on the headdress as a basic disguise, in order to travel through Sunni-held villages on the road between Kufa and Baghdad.

The idea that foreign journalists just lurk in their hotels in Damascus, Baghdad, or Kabul is absurd. A more substantive charge is that they write too much about firefights and skirmishes, the fireworks of war, while neglecting the broader picture that might determine the outcome. “My newspaper doesn’t do what it calls ‘bang-bang’ journalism,” one correspondent said grandly, explaining why none of his colleagues was covering the fighting in Syria first-hand. But the “bang-bang” matters: war may not be explicable without the politics, but the politics can’t be understood without the war. Early on in the occupation of Iraq, I went to al-Dohra power station in Baghdad after one American soldier was shot dead there and another wounded. This was a minor incident in an incipient guerrilla war, but the approval of local people as they stood around the pool of dried blood on the pavement was significant. “We are very poor but we will celebrate by cooking a chicken,” one man said. “God willing, there will be more actions like this.”

Embedding with the American and British armies meant that the journalists ended up having the same experiences as the soldiers and thinking many of the same thoughts. It’s difficult not to bond with people who are important to one’s safety and with whom one shares common dangers. Armies prefer the embedding system in part because they can favor sympathetic reporters and exclude the more critical ones. For journalists, counterintuitively, it often means missing crucial parts of a war, since an experienced guerrilla commander will naturally attack wherever the enemy forces are absent or weak. Anybody embedded with the army will tend to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. In 2004, when the US marines stormed the city of Fallujah, killing many insurgents, they were accompanied by most of Baghdad’s press corps. It was a famous and well-publicized victory. But the insurgent counterstrike, the capture of the much larger city of Mosul in northern Iraq, from which US soldiers had withdrawn, was largely ignored by the media at the time. When Mosul fell a second time in June 2014, few commentators even mentioned that the city had been take over by insurgents ten years earlier, or took on board the implication of this, which was that Baghdad’s control of its second city and the main stronghold of the urban Sunni had always been shaky.

The most sinister change in the way war is perceived through the media springs from what just a few years ago seemed to be a wholly positive development. Satellite television and the use of information supplied by YouTube, bloggers, and social media were portrayed as liberating innovations at the beginning of the Arab Spring. The monopoly on information imposed by police states from Tunisia to Egypt and Bahrain had been broken. But as the course of the uprising in Syria has shown, satellite television and the internet can also be used to spread propaganda and hate.

“Half of Jihad is Media” is one slogan posted on a jihadist website, which, taken broadly, is wholly correct. The ideas, actions, and aims of fundamentalist Sunni jihadists are broadcast daily through satellite television stations, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. As long as such powerful means of propagandizing exist, groups similar to al-Qa‘ida will never go short of money or recruits.

Much of what is disseminated by the jihadists is hate-propaganda against Shia and, more occasionally, against Christians, Sufis, and Jews. It calls for support for jihad in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and anywhere else holy war is being waged. A recent posting shows a romantic-looking suicide bomber who was “martyred” carrying out an attack on an Egyptian police station in Sinai.

Looking at a selection of such online postings, what is striking is not only their violence and sectarianism but also the professionalism with which they are produced. The jihadists may yearn for a return to the norms of early Islam, but their skills in using modern communications and the internet are well ahead of most political movements in the world. By producing a visual record of everything it does, ISIS has greatly amplified its political impact. Its militants dominate social media and produce well-made and terrifying films to illustrate the commitment of their fighters as they identify and kill their enemies. The Iraqi government approach to media differs radically: attempting to maintain morale by downplaying ISIS successes, emphasizing patriotism, and stressing that Baghdad can never fall. Crude propaganda like this frequently leads viewers to switch to al-Arabiya, based in Dubai but Saudi owned, or other channels that broadcast images of the events unfolding across the country, giving the advantage to ISIS propaganda.

In contrast to the sophistication of the technical production of footage by militants, the content is frequently crudely sectarian and violent. Take for instance three pictures from Iraq. The first shows two men in uniform, their hands tied behind their backs, lying dead on what looks like a cement floor. Blood flows from their heads as if they have been shot or their throats cut. The caption reads: “Shia have no medicine but the sword—Anbar victories.”

The second picture shows two armed men beside two bodies, identified by the caption as members of the anti-al-Qa‘ida Sunni Awakening movement in Iraq’s Salah ad-Din province. The third shows a group of Iraqi soldiers holding a regimental banner, but the words on it have been changed to make them offensive to Sunni: “God curse Omar and Abu Bakr” (two early Sunni leaders).

Such internet postings often include appeals for money, issued by Sunni clergy and politicians, to finance jihadi fighters. One such appeal claimed to have raised $2,500 (£1,500) for each of the 12,000 fighters that the group responsible for the appeal had sent to Syria. Another included a picture showing seven shelves, as if in a retail store, which, on closer inspection, could each be seen as displaying a different kind of grenade. The caption beneath the photograph read: “Anbar’s mujahedeen pharmacy for Shia.” ISIS images have also appeared showing prisoners being loaded into flatbed trucks by masked gunmen and later forced to lie face down in a shallow ditch with their arms tied behind their backs. Final pictures showed the blood-covered bodies of captive soldiers, probably Shia, who made up much of the rank-and-file of the Iraqi army. Captions indicated the massacre was in revenge for the death of an ISIS commander, Abdul-Rahman al-Beilawy, whose killing was reported just before ISIS’ surprise offensive that swept through northern Iraq, capturing the Sunni strongholds of Mosul and Tikrit, in mid-June 2014.

It is not just Twitter and Facebook accounts that are used by the jihadists. Two television stations based in Egypt (but reportedly financed from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait), Safa and Wesal, employ journalists and commentators who are vocally hostile to the Shia. Wesal TV broadcasts in five languages: Arabic, Farsi, Kurdish, Indonesian, and Hausa. The Iraqi government response has been to close down some “enemy television stations” as well as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and other internet services, although Iraqis are quick to find ways around official censorship. Followers of ISIS continually flood Twitter with pictures of the bodies of their enemies, but they also use the medium to show functioning hospitals and a consultative administrative process.

Hate preachers, likewise, can incite large numbers of followers on YouTube. Sheikh Mohammad al-Zughbi, a popular vlogger in Egypt, calls on God to protect Egypt from “the criminal traitors and the criminal Shia,” as well as from the Jews and Crusaders. Another sermon entitled “Oh Syria, the victory is coming” says President Assad is “seeking help from these Persians, the Shia, the traitors, the Shia criminals.”

Such rants could be dismissed as being addressed to a small, fanatical audience, but the numbers of viewers show them to be immensely popular. Observers of the rebels in Syria have noted how much time they spend on the internet, using it to follow what they believe is happening elsewhere in the conflict. Further evidence about the impact of satellite television and jihadist websites comes from prisoners taken in Iraq. While, like all prisoners, they are inclined to say what their captors want to hear, their accounts in interviews on Iraqi television ring true. Waleed bin Muhammad al-Hadi al-Masmoudi from Tunisia, the third-largest supplier of foreign jihadists to Syria, told one such program that in making his decision to come to Iraq to fight he “was deeply influenced by al-Jazeera TV channel.” Together with thirteen other volunteers from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Yemen, he had no difficulty in making his way to Fallujah. In another interview, Abdullah Azam Salih al-Qahtani, a former Saudi officer, said: “Arabic media and jihadist websites convinced me to come.”

Some of the portrayals of atrocities that appear on computers and television screens across the world, supposedly within hours of having taken place, are fraudulent. ISIS successes in Iraq are sometimes fabricated with the footage used to advertise them taken in Syria or Libya, or even outside the Middle East altogether. A correspondent in southeast Turkey recently visited a Syrian refugee camp where he found ten-year-old children watching a YouTube clip of two men being executed with a chainsaw. The commentary claimed that the victims were Syrian Sunnis and the killers were Alawites; in fact the film was from Mexico and the murders had been carried out by a drug lord to intimidate his rivals.

Such fraudulent atrocity stories have an effect on a war: a Libyan militiaman who believes that the government soldiers he is fighting are under orders to rape his wife and daughters isn’t going to take many prisoners. But more often the pictures of murder and torture are accurate. Their rapid dissemination explains the ferocity of the conflict in Syria and the difficulty the participants have in negotiating an end to their civil war.

The Arab Spring revolts were a strange mixture of revolution, counterrevolution, and foreign intervention. The international media often became highly confused about what was going on. The revolutionaries of 2011 had many failings but they were highly skilled in influencing and manipulating press coverage. Tahrir Square in Cairo and later the Maidan in Kiev became the arenas where a melodrama pitting the forces of good against evil was played out in front of the television cameras. Good reporters still took immense risks, and sometimes paid with their lives, trying to explain that there was more to what was happening than this oversimplified picture. But the worst media coverage, particularly in the first two years of the revolts, was very bad indeed. One correspondent remarked caustically that trying to describe post-2011 events in Syria from Beirut while relying on rebel sources was “like reporting the last American presidential election from Canada depending on members of the Tea Party faction of the Republican Party for information.”