Intelligence officials are secretly mapping Islamic State media
centers where the jihadists' toxic propaganda is churned out — but
with most operating in civilian neighborhoods, they're off-limits to
U.S.-led airstrikes, the
Washington Times reports.
Efforts to track the locations of Islamic State media outfits are a
"major intelligence priority," and officials "have it mapped but
can't talk about it," one unnamed source tells the Times.
But one analyst was aghast that any hot spots, if known, are not
being destroyed.
"Obviously, if we know where they're producing the propaganda, we
should be doing everything we can to destroy their facilities,"
William McCants, a Brookings Institution scholar and former State
Department senior adviser for countering violent extremism, tells
the Times.
Adding, however, he "would anticipate that the network ISIS media
production operations is pretty well distributed physically."
One unnamed source tells the Times the debate over whether or not to
authorize U.S. military strikes against the media centers is heated
within the Obama administration — because leaving them online allows
officials to continue studying them.
"There's always this balance between needing to take action and
needing to study how they operate," this sources tells the Times,
insisting that "bombing is absolutely not the only way to take a
communications product offline."
The fact, however, that many ISIS media centers are smack in the
middle of civilian neighborhoods is a big problem for the
administration, the Times reports, noting the administration has
taken particular pride that U.S.-led airstrikes have been the most
precise campaign in history in terms of minimizing civilian
casualties.
President Barack Obama said as much in
his speech Monday, declaring "this continues to
be a difficult fight" because "ISIL is dug in, including in urban
areas, and they hide behind civilians, using defenseless men, women
and children as human shields."
According to the Times, the Obama administration is aiming to
counter the ISIS online messaging with international partners — and
by pressuring U.S. social media companies to block extremist content
and links, the Times notes.
But critics, including lawmakers on Capitol Hill and those familiar
with the mapping project, say the effort is badly mismanaged and
underfunded, the Times reports.
Citing an October report by a U.K.-based, counterterrorism think
tank, the Quilliam Foundation, the Times reports there are 35 media
organizational outfits that produce propaganda material from "all
corners of the Islamic State 'caliphate.'"
"This is an exceptionally sophisticated information operation
campaign, the success of which lies in the twin pillars of quantity
and quality," the report said, the Times reports. "Given this scale
and dedication, negative measures like censorship are bound to
fail."
The report also suggested separate media operations are all
linked to a secret "Islamic State Central Media Command."
But the Times reports the thrust of the Obama administration's
strategy for countering ISIS propaganda is less about bombing
and more about what goes on in a little-reported interagency
messaging operation called the Center for Strategic
Counterterrorism Communications, inside the State Department.
Created in 2011, the operation has roughly 69 employees, a
portion of whom engage in daily dissemination of anti-Islamic
State messaging in multiple languages, including English,
Arabic, Urdu and Somali, via such social media outlets as
Twitter and Facebook.
One State Department official who works in the office tells the
Times a recent "Why They Left Daesh" — another name for ISIS —
Twitter campaign that used imagery to highlight the cases of
ISIS defectors who spoke of "severe punishments, brutal torture
and ruthless killings."
The official told The Times that the majority of those working
in the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications are
focused on crafting messaging that exposes "weakness" and "lies"
in ISIS propaganda that can be disseminated to allies around the
world — including moderate Islamic leaders from Europe to the
Middle East and Asia — who can then promote it to young people
who may be targets of ISIS radicalization.
The operation, which has an annual budget of roughly $5.5
million, is being "grossly underfunded," the official tells the
Times, and its importance to the long-term fight against the
extremists has been badly "misunderstood" by critics.
The ISIS propaganda machine, meanwhile, about a month ago put
out an English-language video, the Times reports.
"Not only did it go to staggering lengths to mock the U.S.
military's failure to contain the Islamic State, but a
sober-voiced narrator also went so far as to taunt America over
the sensitive issue of suicide rates among U.S. soldiers and
veterans," the Times reports.
According to the Times, a narrative speaking unaccented English
taunts:
"You claim to have the greatest army history has known. You may
have the numbers and weapons, but your soldiers lack good will
and resolve."
"Still scared from their defeats in Afghanistan and Iraq, they
return dead or suicidal, with over 6,500 of them killing
themselves each year. So while you go around cooking the facts
on the results of your military airstrikes, we continue to haunt
the minds of your soldiers and sew fear into their hearts."
It's unclear where the slickly produced video was edited, and
the Times reports intelligence officials say the final cut could
have been produced and uploaded to an Internet host site by
Islamic State admirers anywhere in the world.
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