Europol unveils collapse of IS media machine

Ahmed Sultan

The terrorist Islamic State (IS) group continues to release promotional materials, even as it has lost almost all its territories in both Iraq and Syria.

The European Union Agency for Law enforcement Cooperation, better known as Europol, issued a new study on the IS media machine during 2018.

It said the machine was significantly undermined in 2018, given the number of materials the organization was able to produce during that year.

It said the European Union targeted the infrastructure of the IS news agency, Amaq, in 2018. It said this move succeeded in trimming the abilities of the agency, noting that this move was followed by other actions against all branches of the agency on social networking sites.

As a result, the supporters of terrorist groups created new accounts and posted materials full of incitement, despite repeated removals of these accounts.

Traditional platforms, Europol said, were abused more than others. It added that the European Union had traced incitement materials in 146 platforms between 2015 and 2018.

Weakness

Although it lost its base in Iraq, IS gained more strength in what is known as Khorasan Province, which includes Afghanistan and Pakistan. Nevertheless, the Khorasan Province managed to release a few videos in 2018.

According to the Europol study, IS backers share the media materials of the organization in order to keep these materials alive. In this, they are different from the backers of al-Qaeda who tend to post new materials.

The quality of the videos released by IS last year was a lot poorer than videos in previous years. IS used modern technologies in shooting its videos in the past, including by using drones.

The Europol study considers this as an indication of the collapse of the IS media machine.

Backers

The weakness of the IS media machine made it necessary for entities backing the organization to step in. These are little known entities that adopt the same IS ideology. These entities focused on posting and re-posting the materials released by IS in the past.

The entities backing IS tried to merge to become one lager entity. They wanted to do this in order to keep working and offering support to the terrorist organization.