SportsCenter for Terrorists
Iraq's Sunni insurgency has developed a sophisticated media campaign to deliver its message over the Internet through daily press releases, weekly and monthly magazines, books, video clips, full-length films, countless websites, and even television stations. Part of the target audience for insurgent media projects are mainstream Arabic-language media, which often amplify the insurgent message to a mass audience.The study is harrowing in its details. According to the Washington Post's coverage of the study:
"Top 20," produced by Ansar al-Sunnah, is a compilation video of attacks on U.S. forces, presented as a greatest-hits competition among "insurgent brigades" for footage of the most spectacular attack. It is made with the express intention to encourage "healthy" rivalry among cells of fighters.From this pop culture-esque highlight show to more traditional media, it looks as if the Al Qaeda and other terrorist factions are have all the media niches covered. The battle for hearts and minds has gone online and multimedia – and the more the rest of us know this, the better."It is very fast-paced and clearly aimed at the video game generation," says [study author Harold] Kimmage, who is an Arabist and a regional analyst for the U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which broadcasts into Iraq.
This may sound familiar to "60 Minutes" viewers: Back in March, "60 Minutes" correspondent Scott Pelley reported a story called "Jihad.com" where he dug deeper into the terrorists' cyberspace strategy, and American attempts to combat it:
"Without a doubt, the Internet is the single most important venue for the radicalization of Islamic youth," says Army Brigadier General John Custer, who is the is head of intelligence at central command, responsible for Iraq and Afghanistan.While we're in the middle of the surge in Iraq – where artillery fire and tactical warfare are being used to stem the tide of extremism – it is crucial for us to realize that the battle for hearts, minds, eyeballs and mouseclicks remains is being fought elsewhere.Custer says he knows where the enemy finds an inexhaustible supply of suicide warriors. "I see 16, 17-year-olds who have been indoctrinated on the Internet turn up on the battlefield. We capture 'em, we kill 'em every day in Iraq, in Afghanistan," he says.
Asked if the Internet is training up new battalions of those young people, Custer tells Pelley, "It's a self-fulfilling prophesy that's exactly what the jihadist Internet is there to do."