Greg Miller and Souad Mekhennet, The Washington Post | Updated: November 21, 2015 09:23 IST
The assignments arrive on slips of paper, each bearing the black flag of
the Islamic State, the seal of the terrorist group's media emir, and
the site of that day's shoot.
"The paper just gives you the location," never the details, said Abu
Hajer al Maghribi, who spent nearly a year as a cameraman for the
Islamic State. Sometimes the job was to film prayers at a mosque, he
said, or militants exchanging fire. But, inevitably, a slip would come
with the coordinates to an unfolding bloodbath.
For
Abu Hajer, that card told him to drive two hours southwest of the
Syrian city of Raqqa, the capital of the caliphate, or Islamic realm,
declared by the militant group. There, he discovered that he was among
10 cameramen sent to record the final hours of more than 160 Syrian
soldiers captured in 2014.
"I held my Canon camera," he said, as the soldiers were stripped to
their underwear, marched into the desert, forced to their knees and
massacred with automatic rifles.
Photo Credit: The Washington Post
His footage quickly found a global audience, released online in an
Islamic State video that spread on social media and appeared in
mainstream news coverage on Al Jazeera and other networks.
Abu Hajer, who is now in prison in Morocco, is among more than a dozen
Islamic State defectors or members in several countries who provided
detailed accounts to The Washington Post of their involvement in, or
exposure to, the most potent propaganda machine ever assembled by a
terrorist group.
What they described resembles a medieval reality show. Camera crews fan
out across the caliphate every day, their ubiquitous presence distorting
the events they purportedly document. Battle scenes and public
beheadings are so scripted and staged that fighters and executioners
often perform multiple takes and read their lines from cue cards.
Cameras, computers and other video equipment arrive in regular shipments
from Turkey. They are delivered to a media division dominated by
foreigners - including at least one American, according to those
interviewed - whose production skills often stem from previous jobs they
held at news channels or technology companies.
Senior media operatives are treated as "emirs" of equal rank to their
military counterparts. They are directly involved in decisions on
strategy and territory. They preside over hundreds of videographers,
producers and editors who form a privileged, professional class with
status, salaries and living arrangements that are the envy of ordinary
fighters.
"It is a whole army of media personnel," said Abu Abdullah al Maghribi, a
second defector who served in the Islamic State's security ranks but
had extensive involvement with its propaganda teams.
"The media people are more important than the soldiers," he said. "Their
monthly income is higher. They have better cars. They have the power to
encourage those inside to fight and the power to bring more recruits to
the Islamic State."
Increasingly, that power extends beyond the borders of the caliphate.
The attacks in Paris were carried out by militants who belonged to a
floating population of Islamic State followers, subjects who are
scattered among dozens of countries and whose attachments to the group
exist mainly online.
Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the alleged architect of the attacks who was killed
in a raid in France, had appeared repeatedly in Islamic State recruiting
materials. The barrage of videos and statements released afterward made
clear that the overriding goal of the Islamic State is not merely to
inflict terror on an adversary but also to command a global audience.
The United States and its allies have found no meaningful answer to this
propaganda avalanche. A State Department program to counter the
caliphate's messaging has cycled through a series of initiatives with
minimal effect. Islamic State supporters online have repeatedly slipped
around efforts to block them on Twitter and Facebook.
Overmatched online, the United States has turned to lethal force. Recent
U.S. airstrikes have killed several high-level operatives in the
Islamic State's media division, including Junaid Hussain, a British
computer expert. FBI Director James B. Comey recently described the
propaganda units of the Islamic State, also known as ISIL, as military
targets.
"I am optimistic that the actions of our colleagues in the military to
reduce the supply of ISIL tweeters will have an impact," Comey said at
an event last month in Washington. "But we'll have to watch that space
and see."
Research for this article involved interviews with Islamic State
defectors and members, as well as security officials and
counterterrorism experts in six countries on three continents. The most
authoritative accounts came from seven Islamic State defectors who were
either in prison in Morocco or recently released after facing terrorism
charges upon their return from Syria. All spoke on the condition that
they be identified only by the adopted names that they used in Syria.
Those interviews were conducted with the permission of the Moroccan
government in the administrative wing of a prison complex near the
nation's capital. The prisoners said they spoke voluntarily after being
approached by Moroccan authorities on behalf of The Post. Other
prisoners declined. Most of the interviews took place in the presence of
security officials, an arrangement that probably led participants to
play down their roles in the Islamic State but seemed to have little
effect on their candor in describing the caliphate's media division.
Abu Hajer, a soft-spoken Moroccan with a thin beard and lean physique,
said he had been active in jihadist media circles for more than a decade
before he entered Syria in 2013. He began participating in online
Islamist forums after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, he said, and
later became an administrator of an influential site known as Shamukh,
giving him authority to admit new members and monitor the material other
militants posted.
Those credentials cleared his path to coveted assignments within the
Islamic State, a group that began as al-Qaida's affiliate in Iraq before
splitting off from that terrorist network in an ideological rupture two
years ago.
The group has an elaborate system for evaluating and training new
arrivals. Abu Hajer said that shortly after entering Syria he was
groomed to be part of the Islamic State's media team. He spent two
months undergoing basic military training before he was admitted to a
special, month-long program for media operatives.
The program "specializes in how to do filming. How to mix footage. How
to get the right voice and tone" in interviews, he said. After
completing the course, he was given a Canon camera, a Samsung Galaxy
smartphone and an assignment with the caliphate's media unit in Raqqa.
Why did victims in Islamic State beheading videos look so calm? They
didn't know it was real.
Abu Hajer, who is in his mid-30s, had come from an impoverished corner
of Morocco. Now that he is in prison, his wife and children have
returned to the encampment where they lived before departing, a shanty
village of corrugated tin and plywood with no running water near a
cement plant on the outskirts of Rabat.
In Syria, they were given a villa with a garden. Abu Hajer was issued a
car, a Toyota Hilux with four-wheel drive to enable him to reach remote
assignments. He was also paid a salary of $700 a month - seven times the
sum paid to typical fighters - plus money for food, clothes and
equipment. He said he was also excused from the taxes that the Islamic
State imposes on most of its subjects.
He quickly settled into a routine that involved getting his work
assignments each morning on pieces of paper that also served as travel
documents enabling him to pass Islamic State checkpoints. Most jobs were
mundane, such as capturing scenes from markets or celebrations of
Muslim holidays.
Abu Hajer said he encountered only one Western hostage, John Cantlie, a
British war correspondent who was kidnapped in Syria in 2012. Cantlie
was cast by his captors in a series of BBC-style news reports that
touted the caliphate's bustling economies and adherence to Islamic law
while mocking Western governments.
Abu Hajer said he filmed Cantlie in Mosul in 2014, and he said that by
then the British broadcaster was no longer wearing an orange jumpsuit or
confined to a darkened room and was allowed to wander among the markets
and streets of Mosul for camera crews.
"I cannot tell you whether he was coerced or threatened. He was walking
freely," Abu Hajer said, an assertion that is at odds with what is known
about Cantlie's captivity.
A video released in January shows Cantlie in multiple locations in
Mosul, including one in which he is riding a motorcycle with an armed
militant seated behind him. It was among his final appearances before
the series was halted with no explanation or subsequent indication of
Cantlie's fate, although articles attributed to him have since appeared
in the caliphate's magazine.
One of Abu Hajer's next assignments took him to an elaborately staged
scene of carnage, a mass execution-style killing choreographed for
cameras in a way that has become an Islamic State signature.
After arriving at the site, he said that he and the other camera
operators gathered to "organize ourselves so that we wouldn't all film
[from] the same perspective."
Abu Hajer said he had grave objections to what happened to the Syrian
soldiers in the massacre that he filmed in the desert near Tabqa air
base. But he acknowledged that his misgivings had more to do with how
the soldiers were treated - and whether that comported with Islamic law -
than any concern for their fates.
As the soldiers were stripped and marched into the desert, Abu Hajer
said he filmed from the window of his car as an Egyptian assistant drove
alongside the parade of condemned men.
"When the group stopped, I got out," he said. "They were told to kneel
down. Some soldiers got shot. Others were beheaded." The video, still
available online, shows multiple camera operators moving in and out of
view as Islamic State operatives fire hundreds of rounds.
"It wasn't the killing of soldiers that I was against," Abu Hajer said.
"They were Syrian soldiers, Nusairis," he said, referring to the
religious sect to which Syrian President Bashar Assad and his closest
supporters belong. "I thought they deserved to get shot."
"What I didn't like was that they were stripped to their underwear," he
said, an indignity that he considered an affront to Islamic law.
Abu Hajer also said he kept his lens aimed away from the beheadings
because of his objections to the practice. But asked whether he
considered refusing to record the massacre, he said he feared that would
consign him to the fate of those he filmed.
"You don't want to do it," he said, "but you know that you cannot say, 'No.' "
The contradictions of the Islamic State's propaganda apparatus can make its structure and strategy seem incoherent.
The group exerts extraordinarily tight control over the production of
its videos and messages but relies on the chaos of the Internet and
social media to disseminate them. Its releases cluster around seemingly
incompatible themes: sometimes depicting the caliphate as a peaceful and
idyllic domain, other times as a society awash in apocalyptic violence.
The dual messages are designed to influence a divided audience. The
beheadings, immolations and other spectacles are employed both to menace
Western adversaries and to appeal to disenfranchised Muslim males
weighing a leap into the Islamist fray.
A separate collection depicts the Islamic State as a livable
destination, a benevolent state committed to public works. Videos show
the construction of public markets, smiling religious police on
neighborhood patrols and residents leisurely fishing on the banks of the
Euphrates.
Even the concept of the caliphate has a dual aspect. The terrorist
group's rise is a result mainly of its demonstrated military power and
the tangible territory it has seized. But a remarkable amount of its
energy is devoted to creating an alternative, idealized version of
itself online and shaping how that virtual empire is perceived.
That project has been entrusted to a media division that was operational
well before the caliphate was formally declared in 2014. U.S.
intelligence officials said they have little insight into who controls
the Islamic State's propaganda strategy, although it is presumed to be
led by Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, the caliphate's main spokesman.
The media wing has relied on veterans of al-Qaida media teams, young
recruits fluent in social media platforms, and a bureaucratic discipline
reminiscent of totalitarian regimes. Defectors and current members said
that phones and cameras they brought to Syria were impounded upon
arrival by the Islamic State to prevent unauthorized and potentially
unflattering images from finding their way online.
Only sanctioned crew members were allowed to carry cameras, and even
they were to follow strict guidelines on the handling of their material.
Once finished with a day's shooting, the crews were to load their
recordings onto laptops, transfer the footage to memory sticks, then
deliver those to designated drop sites.
In an Islamic State enclave near Aleppo, the media division's
headquarters was a two-story home in a residential neighborhood,
defectors said. The site was protected by armed guards, and only those
with permission from the regional emir were allowed to enter.
Each floor had four rooms packed with cameras, computers and other
high-end equipment, said Abu Abdullah, 37, who made occasional visits to
the site as a security and logistics operative. Internet access went
through a Turkish wireless service.
The house served as an editorial office of Dabiq, the Islamic State's
glossy online magazine. Some also worked for al-Furqan, the terrorist
group's main media wing, which accounts for the majority of its videos
and mass-audience statements.
Overall, there were more than 100 media operatives assigned to the unit,
Abu Abdullah said. "Some of them were hackers; some were engineers."
Abu Abdullah had no affiliation with the media arm, but he often did its
bidding. At one point he was tapped to install a generator at the media
headquarters so that it would not lose power when electricity went
down.
Another assignment involved recovering corpses from battle scenes and
arranging them to be photographed for propaganda videos exalting their
sacrifice. He would wash away dried blood, lift the corners of dead
fighters' mouths into beatific smiles, and raise their index fingers in a
gesture adopted by the Islamic State as a symbol of its cause.
Many in the American public were introduced to the Islamic State through
wrenching videos in which Mohammed Emwazi - a masked, knife-wielding
militant with a British accent known as "Jihadi John" - slit the throats
of Western hostages, including Americans James Foley and Steve Sotloff.
Scrutiny of those and other videos revealed an extraordinary level of
choreography. Discrepancies among frames showed that scenes had been
rehearsed and shot in multiple takes over many hours.
The releases showed professional-caliber attention to lighting, sound
and camera positioning. Certain videos, including one showing a
decapitated American Peter Kassig, appear to have employed special
effects software to digitally impose images of Kassig and his killer
against a dramatic backdrop.
Those production efforts were reserved for videos aimed at mass Western
audiences and were addressed explicitly to President Barack Obama. But
defectors said that even internal events not intended for a global
viewership were similarly staged.
Abu Abdullah said he had witnessed a public execution-style killing in
the city of Al Bab in which a propaganda team presided over almost every
detail. They brought a white board scrawled with Arabic script to serve
as an off-camera cue card for the public official charged with reciting
the condemned man's alleged crimes. The hooded executioner raised and
lowered his sword repeatedly so that crews could catch the blade from
multiple angles.
The beheading took place only when the camera crew's director said it
was time to proceed. The execution wasn't run by the executioner, Abu
Abdullah said. "It's the media guy who says when they are ready."
For two decades, the dominant brand in militant Islam was al-Qaida. But
the Islamic State has eclipsed it in the span of two years by turning
the older network's propaganda playbook on its head.
Al-Qaida's releases always exalted its leaders, particularly Osama bin
Laden. But the Islamic State's propaganda is generally focused on its
fighters and followers. Appearances by leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi or
his senior lieutenants have been rare.
Rejecting the lecture format employed by al-Qaida, the Islamic State's
videos are cinematic, emphasizing dramatic scenes, stylized transitions
and special effects.
"The group is very image-conscious, much like a corporation," said a
U.S. intelligence official involved in monitoring the Islamic State's
media operations. Its approach to building its brand is so disciplined,
the official said, "that it's very much like saying 'This is Coca-Cola'
or 'This is Nike.' "
The propaganda competition with al-Qaida is a high priority, defectors
said. One former Islamic State fighter said that he came under enormous
pressure from the organization after it learned that his father had been
a high-ranking al-Qaida operative killed in Pakistan in a CIA drone
strike.
Islamic State media figures pushed the recruit to appear in a video
renouncing his father's organization, said the son, who spoke on the
condition that neither he nor his father be identified. His refusal, and
reluctance to fight al-Qaida's affiliate in Syria, damaged his standing
in the Islamic State, and he said he fled in fear for his life.
Al-Qaida has typically required extraordinary patience from its
audience. Even its most media-savvy affiliate, the al-Qaida branch in
Yemen, often takes months to release new issues of its online magazine,
Inspire.
The frequency and volume of releases by the Islamic State are staggering
by comparison. The group has produced hundreds of videos in more than a
half-dozen languages, puts out daily radio broadcasts and garners as
many as 2 million mentions per month on Twitter.
The group also appears to have connections to prominent media organizations in the Middle East.
Twitter and Facebook have moved to shut down accounts associated with
the Islamic State and ban the distribution of its messages, but users
have found ways to resurface. Thousands of loyalists have also flocked
to new services that are less vulnerable to government scrutiny,
including Telegram, a messaging application created by a Russian
software entrepreneur, although Telegram began shutting down Islamic
State channels after the Paris attacks.
The Islamic State has also exploited apparent connections to news
organizations in the Middle East. A segment that aired on Al Jazeera in
2013 depicted children attending schools in the caliphate. Images that
later surfaced online appeared to show that the cameraman for that piece
was Reda Seyam, a militant who had been linked to terrorist plots and
is a senior figure in the Islamic State.
In a comprehensive examination of the terrorist group's media releases
in the summer, Charlie Winter, until recently an analyst at the Quilliam
Group in the United Kingdom, identified 1,146 distinct pieces of
propaganda, including photos, videos and audio releases, during a single
month-long stretch.
Winter counted as many as 36 separate media offices that answer to the
Islamic State's headquarters in Raqqa - including affiliates in Libya,
Afghanistan and West Africa - and saw evidence of extraordinary
coordination across the network.
At one point during his study, on July 19, he noticed that every
affiliate had simultaneously shifted to a new logo with the same
stylized Arabic script. The icon appeared in the same location on every
image and in the initial frame of every video release.
"There was clearly a communique issued," Winter said in an interview.
"The Islamic State is constantly striving to be as formalized, as
bureaucratic-seeming as possible, to keep up the appearance of being a
state."
That effort to simulate legitimacy is particularly pervasive inside the caliphate.
The same videos employed to shock outsiders are used internally to cow
the group's less enthusiastic subjects. A constant stream of utopian
messages is designed to convince residents, in Soviet-style fashion, of
the superiority of the Islamic State.
While Internet access is often restricted to the public, propaganda
units set up giant viewing screens in neighborhoods where residents come
out in the evenings to watch approved videos streamed from laptops.
"It's like a movie theater," said Abu Hourraira al-Maghribi, a
23-year-old with a shaved head who wore an Adidas hoodie when he met
with reporters in prison. The videos are drawn from the Islamic State's
expanding film library, he said, depicting "daily life, [military]
training and beheadings."
The Islamic State's most notorious videos - including those showing the
beheadings of Western hostages and the burning of a caged Jordanian
fighter pilot - were shown over and over, he said, long after their
audiences beyond the caliphate dissipated.
Abu Hourraira said he attended one screening on a street near the
University of Mosul that attracted about 160 people, including at least
10 women and 15 children. One of the videos showed an execution by
Emwazi, who is believed to have been killed this month in a U.S. drone
strike.
"The kids, they are not looking away - they are fascinated by it," Abu
Hourraira said. Jihadi John became a subject of such fascination that
some children started to mimic his uniform, he said, wearing all "black
and a belt with a little knife."
The Islamic State maintains strict bureaucratic boundaries within its
media wing. Camera crews were kept separate from the teams of producers
and editors who stitched the raw footage together, adding titles,
effects and soundtracks. Real names were almost never exchanged.
But Abu Hajer and two other defectors said that an American in his late
30s with white skin and dark-but-graying hair was a key player in some
of the Islamic State's most ambitious videos.
"The American does the editing," Abu Hajer said, and was the creative
force behind a 55-minute documentary called "Flames of War" that was
released in late 2014. The film strives to create a mythology
surrounding the Islamic State's origin and connection to the historic
Muslim caliphate.
It culminates with scenes of Syrian soldiers digging their own graves
while a masked fighter, speaking English with a North American accent,
warns that "the flames of war are only beginning to intensify."
Another American-sounding figure surfaced more recently, delivering
daily news broadcasts that appear to emanate from a radio station that
the Islamic State overran last year in Mosul. After the attacks in
Paris, his voice was the one that most English-speaking audiences heard
describing France as "the capital of prostitution and vice" and warning
that governments involved in strikes in Syria "will continue to be at
the top of the target list."
U.S. officials said they have been unable to determine the identity of
that speaker or others with North American accents. The militant who
appeared in the "Flames of War" film remains the subject of an entry on
the FBI's Web site appealing to the public for help identifying him.
The Islamic State's relentless media campaign has fueled a global
migration of militants. More than 30,000 foreign fighters from more than
115 countries have flooded into Syria since the start of that country's
civil war. At least a third arrived within the past year, the vast
majority of them to join the Islamic State, according to U.S.
intelligence estimates.
Of the defectors interviewed by The Post, all but one said their
decisions to leave for Syria could be traced to videos they saw online,
or encounters on social media, that ignited a jihadist impulse. The only
outlier said that he had been prodded by a friend to come to Syria and
was promptly imprisoned for refusing to fight.
Abu Hourraira, who spent months fighting in Iraq, said he began
searching online for material about the Islamic State as the group began
to dominate headlines about the war in Syria. He decided to abandon his
job at a dry-cleaning business in Casablanca only after watching the
group's emotionally charged videos.
"Some were like Van Damme movies," he said, referring to Jean-Claude Van
Damme, the Hollywood action star. "You see these men fighting, and you
want to be one of these brave heroes."
Like many countries in the region, Morocco has struggled to offset that
pull. Moroccan security officials said that more than 1,500 men had left
the country to fight in Iraq and Syria, plus more than 500 women and
children, many of them seeking to join their spouses, sons or fathers.
Several of the attackers in Paris, including the alleged architect, were
of Moroccan descent, but were born and grew up in Europe.
"The fight now is with the propaganda because it plays a very big role
in these numbers," said a senior Moroccan security official who spoke on
the condition that neither he nor his agency be identified. Al-Qaida
recruitment relied almost exclusively on direct contact in mosques or
other settings, he said, but "now, 90 percent are being recruited
online."
Defectors offered conflicting views on whether the Islamic State would
endure. Some said that a cohort of young males in Iraq and Syria are
already coming of age immersed in the group's propaganda and ideology,
and that a generation of children was being raised to idealize its
masked militants.
But all attributed their decisions to leave Iraq and Syria to a
combination of factors, including not only fears for their safety but
also a disenchantment that set in when the reality of the caliphate
failed to match the version they had encountered online.
Some said they were haunted by scenes of cruelty they saw firsthand but
that Islamic State propaganda teams edited out. Abu Abdullah, who wore a
hood to disguise his identity during an interview, said he witnessed a
mass killing near Aleppo in which Islamic State fighters fired into a
crowd of Alawites including women and children.
When a 10-year-old boy emerged alive, the highest-ranking militant on
hand "pulled out a gun and shot him," Abu Abdullah said. The slaying was
recorded by the ever-present camera crews, he said, but the footage
"was never aired."
Abu Hajer, the former cameraman, said his standing with the group began
to slip when he became involved in helping to administer the Islamic
State's religious courts. After sharing views that he said were at odds
with his superiors, the perks of his media position were withdrawn.
"They took away my weapons, my monthly income," as well as his villa and
car, he said. A relative told a Post reporter that Abu Hajer finally
pulled his family out of Syria after he had received a warning in which
an Islamic State militant dragged a finger across his throat.
A sympathetic colleague gave Abu Hajer the paperwork he needed to pass
Islamic State checkpoints on the way out of Syria, he said. Another
friend gave him cash to put his family on a flight out of Turkey.
Moroccan authorities were waiting for him at the Casablanca airport.
He now shares a crowded cell with other militants in a high-walled
Moroccan prison, with two years remaining on a three-year sentence.
Asked whether he worries that his work will induce others to join the
Islamic State, he gave an equivocal answer. "To a certain extent I feel
responsible," he said. "But I am not the main reason."
His videos continue to circulate online.
© 2015 The Washington Post
Over the skies of Florida and the Gulf of Mexico, the unmanned plane
known as the QF-16 took off, executed a series of tactical maneuvers,
broke the sound barrier, and landed safely. Two pilots flew the planes
from the ground. 
Bamako:
Gunmen who stormed a luxury hotel in Mali's capital
and seized more than 100 guests and staff today no longer have any
hostages after a rescue operation by special forces, the Mali government
has said.
Moscow:
Russia is pounding the Islamic State jihadists in
Syria with bombs emblazoned with the words "For our people" and "For
Paris" after Moscow vowed vengeance following the bombing of a plane
over Sinai.