America in digital war with IS

- US directly engaging young Arabs with anti-extremist messages

BRIAN KNOWLTON

Volunteers attend a combat training session in Basra. (AFP) Washington, Sept. 27: Along with its surprising military success, the Islamic State group has demonstrated a skill and sophistication with social media previously unseen in extremist groups. And just as the US has begun an aggressive air campaign against the militants, Richard A. Stengel, the under secretary of state for public diplomacy, believes the US has no choice but to counter their propaganda with a forceful online response. “Sending a jazz trio to Budapest is not really what we want to do in 2014,” said Stengel, referring to the soft-edged cultural diplomacy that sent musicians like Dave Brubeck on tours of Eastern-bloc capitals to counter communism during the Cold War. “We have to be tougher, we have to be harder, particularly in the information space, and we have to hit back.” But now, digital operators at the state department are directly engaging young people — and sometimes extremists — on websites popular in Arab countries, publishing a stream of anti-Islamic State messages, and one somewhat shocking video, on Facebook or YouTube or Twitter, using the hashtag #Think Again Turn Away. Critics have questioned whether this effort is large, nimble or credible enough. The US’s image in West Asia — which seemed perched on the verge of hopefulness when President Obama delivered a closely watched speech in Cairo in 2009 — is now at “the bottom of a sliding scale”, said Lina Khatib, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center, in Beirut. Stengel, who joined the Obama administration in February after seven years as managing editor of Time magazine, is focusing his efforts on an approach that reflects Obama’s insistence that countries like Iraq must take responsibility for their own defence. While secretary of state John Kerry was assembling a military coalition against the Islamic State on his most recent trip to West Asia, Stengel met Arab officials to create what he called in an interview “a communications coalition, a messaging coalition, to complement what’s going on the ground”. The Centre for Strategic Counterterrorism Communication is the state department’s spearhead in this fight and potentially defines the kind of pushback it would like to see friendly countries in the region engage in. Formed in 2010 to counter messaging from al Qaida and its affiliated groups, the interagency unit engages in online forums in Arabic, Urdu, Punjabi and Somali. It recently added English, making itself more transparent — and more open to critical scrutiny. Posting on Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube and Facebook, members of the unit question claims made by IS, trumpet the militants’ setbacks and underscore the human cost of the militants’ brutality. Terror groups in Somalia and Nigeria are also targeted.

NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVIC