Islamic State – One Year On Understanding and Countering the Caliphate’s Brand The Islamic State (IS) brand is widely misinterpreted. Its propaganda machine is notorious for its brutality, but little else; the bigger picture of its political messaging is routinely ignored. Analysis, even at government level, focuses superficially on what IS propaganda is saying – be it through video, photography or audio – rather than what it is doing or seeking to do. More often than not, the IS version of events, its official, heavily refined and misleading line, is taken as sacrosanct. It is not enough to simply conclude that IS’ propaganda is unprecedented, let alone that it is impossible to challenge. Indeed, challenge its narratives we must. They are the means by which IS markets its product, its chief way of attracting new recruits and drawing in donors. If the successful dissection and decimation of IS’ carefully curated brand is focused upon as a key part of the coalition’s efforts, the organisation could be brought to its knees. However at this current juncture, the international community is not even in a position to understand the brand, let alone dismantle it. The relation between IS’ brutality and its branding, between its actions and words, must be spelled out. First, it must first be laid down, once and for all, that IS is not al-Qaeda. It stopped being as such a long time ago, and to apply the CT models that were developed to counter al-Qaeda to try to counter IS is a flawed approach, one that is doomed to failure. The rest of this report builds on this analysis.
1. A good image brings power First of all, we must ask ourselves why IS is willing to make such significant operational security sacrifices by fostering its public image in the way it does. It circulates photographs, videos, even radio interviews from the frontlines of its offensives; it openly documents what
appears to be every facet of its war machine, from training to equipment. In the context of war, there is an extreme conflict between security and publicity, but IS’ leadership has evidently chosen to sacrifice the former in order to allow for the latter. Of course if IS’ messaging is understood uniquely as a branding exercise, this makes sense. There are no two ways about it – in order for a strong product to exist, secrecy must be cast aside, sacrificed on the altar of relevance. Through examining in greater detail why IS is willing to make this sacrifice, a number of distinct motivations emerge. In the context of this briefing, our focus is on product differentiation. Evidently, IS needs to create and channel its brand in order to differentiate itself from its rivals. After all, the resources that jihadist groups require are scarce. Like similar products competing with each other for sales in a free market, jihadist groups must compete with each other for the same scarce resources – namely, extremist recruits and extremist donors. It was with this in mind that IS declared the reestablishment of the caliphate, an act with which it seized the global jihadist initiative. However, the declaration was not enough to distinguish it from its likeminded rivals forever. Hence, IS has since redoubled its efforts in disseminating its brand. Now, with the constant, steady supply of official propaganda, all of which is carefully branded with an extreme air of officialdom, IS is able to rise above all other groups, al-Qaeda included. To be sure, al-Qaeda does have its own branding, but it pales in comparison. This is a deliberate move by IS and reflective of its different media strategy. In the global jihadist market, effective branding is the means by which IS can advertise itself, show off its unique selling point, sell its ideas to curious onlookers. It has enabled IS to cast otherwise impossible aspersions as to the legitimacy of its chief rival, al-Qaeda. By declaring itself the only legitimate representative of Sunni Muslims, IS has essentially ruled that, if an individual knowingly chooses another jihadist group over it, they are bad Muslims or even murtadīn (apostates). While all jihadist groups practice takfīr (excommunication) as a way of strengthening their ideology by keeping it pure from innovation or perceived threats, IS uses takfīr as a strategy to carve a distinct brand. This is hugely controversial and an element of IS’ existence that, even now, continues to cleave the global jihadist spectrum in two.
2. Brand assembly How has IS managed to do this? How has it manipulated the very rudiments of jihadism to complement its political aspirations without alienating its audience? Firstly, it is worth pointing out that the organisation that we see today has been a long time coming. IS and its predecessors have long been building up a system of perceived values, consisting of both tangible issues, like education and currency, and intangible concepts, like tawḥīd (the oneness of God) and al-walā’ w-al-barā’ (loyalty and disavowal). The IS brand is based on these two foundational thought systems of governance and theology. Unlike other jihadist
groups, IS puts an unusual amount of emphasis on both foundations, flooding the Internet on a daily basis with reminders of its constant implementation of the tangible and firm commitment to the intangible. IS’ leadership has deemed it necessary to augment a change in the traditional jihadist narrational paradigm, a need to revitalise the ideology. In a changing world, the need for dynamism – or at least the perception of dynamism – is critical. In this day and age, clinging on to past strategies, simply imitating predecessors, does not secure success for a jihadist group. Hence, the decision was made to transition from “statehood” to “caliphatehood”, a shift that encompassed a significant challenge to the global jihadist status quo. Caliphatehood meant the preoccupation on resistance could be cast aside. Caliphatehood meant institutionalising the movement and codifying its rules and regulations. Caliphatehood meant that jihad could be recast as offensive and expansive. To be sure, when the first “Islamic state” was established in 2006, this was the ultimate goal; however, the shift from “state” to “caliphate” is far more controversial and much riskier than it was from “group” to “state”. Long before the caliphate declaration on 29 June 2014, the very terminology the IS organisation used to refer to its various activities was refined to build into this institutionalisation. Attempting to hark back to the early years of Islam, to wipe the intervening years clean and replace their “innovations” with pristine Islamic governance, IS brands itself as a direct descendant of the four Rightly Guided Caliphs. Needless to say, this is only by name. Its various branches of governance, the Bayt al-Māl, Dīwān al-Ta’līm and Maktab al-Khadmāt, for example, closely mimic their modern day secular equivalents. However, labelling them in terms that have historical and theological traction with all Muslims undeniably adds to the caliphal mystique and lends the brand consistency.
3. Externalise appeal One of the aspects that IS’ propagandists boast about most of all is the organisation’s unparalleled brutality. Whether it is the beheading of “sorcerers”, execution of “spies”, or the amputation of the hands of “thieves”, IS makes its presence known globally through obscene acts of violence, carefully documented and assembled so that they are somewhat sterilized and the alienation of its audiences is hence avoided. For the brand to succeed, it is imperative that the audiences for this brutality are as large as possible. This is the violence of IS’ understanding of “justice”, something that is meticulously crafted to be at home in the public domain. IS is marketing it on an industrial scale. Internationally, it wants to force people to acknowledge its harsh punishments, convince non-Muslims that it is part of Islam. It wants to provoke outrage in hostile populations and force their governments to act carelessly on the back of this anger. On a local level, it advertises its
fetish for security and stability to send the message that, if people avoid breaking IS’ rules or interfering in its business, then it will not interfere in their lives. It brags about the fact that thieves, rapists, murderers, regime informers and so on and so forth are all dealt with, swiftly and mercilessly. In the context of the lawlessness and warlordism that is beginning to characterise much of Syria, this has a certain appeal. Perhaps it is for this reason that the population of Raqqa has grown so significantly. Last, but by no means least, to other jihadists, it is asserting itself as implementer of God’s word, the vanguard jihadist group. Almost all of IS’ messaging – especially its violent content – is built around the premise that it needs to demonstrate that it is walking the jihadist walk, not just talking about grand concepts like sharī’ah, al-walā’ w-al-barā’ and tawḥīd. Brutality, a most eye-catching frame for political messaging, serves a rigidly defined purpose. A regular assertion made by Western politicos is that this brutality will one day undermine the organisation. This is categorically wrong though, something that has been resoundingly proven in recent months by IS’ continued ability to consolidate control in its heartlands.
4. Be “Islamic” One cannot question the fact that IS’ brand is couched in Islam. The group makes sure to justify every single one of its actions – abhorrent and otherwise – by cherry-picking from scripture, scholarship and history. The four constituent key sources of its brand are, unsurprisingly: 1. The Qur’ān 2. The Sunnah – deeds and sayings – of the Prophet Muhammad 3. The fiqh of Muslim scholars, primarily those from the medieval period 4. al-Mumārisāt al-Tārīkhiyyah – historical practices – are drawn upon to justify controversial actions and shape strategies. Using the appropriate de-contextualised scripture, everything it does is, in its theory, theologically sound. It does not stop at Islam, but manipulates historical precedents too. Whatever the case, IS’ leadership has expended – and continues to expend – great effort to ensure that it is always ring-fenced with precedents, theological, scholarly and historical. As it stands, IS is able to manage its image with relative ease. The means by which it saturates the Internet with its propaganda, the sheer volume of content that it produces, means that it can control the way it is understood externally in spite of the fact that its enemies – state and non-state actors – are seeking to tarnish it. To a damaging extent, the IS group’s caliphate is understood exactly as it desires. It portrays itself as a real state engaging in a real war with its enemies, attacked from all sides but forever expanding. It is only through branding that IS is able to maintain this idea.
IS’ branding must be understood as a strategic asset. It attracts theological, human and financial capital. It creates a pull factor, allows the group to sell itself as a new jihadist “product” and steal support from its rivals’ target market.
5. Mitigating the threat This is not the first time that the international community has faced a terrorist threat. However, this one is different because of its geographical and ideational scale. Only through military and political means will the geographical dimension of the crisis be dealt with. However in the realm of ideas, where IS is just as vulnerable to attack, there is currently little effort being made. This must change. All branding strategists recognise that audiences are customers and success is found through the building of relationships with the customer. IS’ propagandists understand this. Using religion to justify its brand, they subjugate their audiences so that they are forced to call into question the very foundations of their values. Through its constant output of videos, radio programmes and photographic reports, IS’ media machine forces upon people an alternative view of the world, at the same time as offering an alternative governance structure to the traditional Westphalian model. In this way, IS is not just a social movement offering resistance with some far off revolution in mind, it is able to position itself as the revolution itself. Of singular importance to the group is this sense of unity – its strength lies in the fact that it is contiguous, not just territorially or materially, but emotionally and symbolically as well. Before the international community can even begin to assist local actors in “degrading and destroying” IS, there must be some brand restructuring on its part. Currently, the coalition is composed of four different sectors that, even though they are seeking to achieve the same goal, are doing so ineffectively because they are structurally impaired from efficiently coordinating their efforts. There are the local governments, responding to matters as reality dictates; then there are the international governments, operating as far as the electoral system enables them to; thirdly there is the defence and security community, which understands the situation but is limited in its proactivity by the previous sectors; and fourthly there are academic institutions and non-governmental organisations, which are replete with ideas but unable to structure policy or deliver at the capacity required to achieve significant change. Such is the current structure of the counter-IS coalition that, if one of the above four groupings makes headway, it is inhibited by a lack of cohesion in the others. As a result of this, billions of dollars are misspent on well-intentioned but ill-advised policies. It is imperative that there is some radical rethinking when it comes to the international strategy
to counter IS. Military and diplomatic means alone will not be enough. The coalition needs contiguity – these spheres must be realigned.
6. Countering the brand The complexity of IS’ brand is unprecedented. It will not be effectively countered unless it is understood properly in the first place. Awareness of IS’ brand anatomy seems to be, at a governmental level, resting at nil. Currently, much analysis is based exclusively on material that IS’ propagandists produce. Strategically, this gives IS an immediate victory over its enemies. Urgent change is required, for attacking IS will forever be doomed to failure for as long as IS is understood through the lens that it itself cultivates. In order to appreciate why the international coalition is failing in Iraq and Syria, the international coalition must improve its ability to understand the entity it is warring against. Applying past models of assessment and analysis to IS is mistaken – a new information architecture must be designed to replace it. Current efforts to exploit these weaknesses are piecemeal and it is imperative that IS the brand is attacked, as well as IS the organisation. In the coming months, Quilliam will publish a series of strategic briefings. Basing our strategic advice and critique upon ongoing research and past experiences, we will propose that the effort to degrade and destroy IS must be radically changed along the following lines. Each of the below points will be further explored in future briefings:
This is a war of ideas as much as it is a physical war. In any case, the coalition’s efforts must be reorganised into a “team of teams” structure. To accompany this, there must be a revised information architecture into which all elements of the war on IS may be incorporated. The IS leadership must face more direct pressure from the coalition, both militarily and in terms of information. There must be a separately devised strategy for degrading the organisation’s active support base, the followers of the IS leadership. Much of IS’ success is derived of its ability to attract and integrate all its followers – both foreign and domestic – into both its war machine and governance structures. This is a point of vulnerability that could be exploited.
By Noman Benotman and Charlie Winter 17 June 2015