Читать книгу Information Wars - Richard Stengel - Страница 34

August 2014. The video begins with moody, hypnotic music. White type on a black background: “A Message to America” in English and Arabic. A grainy clip of President Obama authorizing air strikes. Then a cut to a man in an orange tunic kneeling in a vast desert against a darkening sky. Shaved head. Stubble on his chin. A strong, handsome face. He looks straight at the camera.

Looming over him, a tall, slender soldier in black with a balaclava over his head. He is holding a knife and has a gun in a leather clip draped over his shoulder.

Then in a strong voice with an American accent, the man in the orange tunic says:

I call on my friends, family, and loved ones to rise up against my real killers, the U.S. government. For what will happen to me is only a result of their complacency and criminality.

The microphone in his collar picks up the sound of him swallowing. His voice chokes as he mentions his brother.

I call on my brother John, who is a member of the U.S. Air Force. Think about what you are doing. Think about the lives you destroy, including those of your own family.

And then:

I wish I had more time. I wish I could have the hope for freedom and seeing my family once again … I guess all in all I wish I wasn’t American.

Then the man in black spoke. His voice was grim, and his accent sounded as though it could be from East London. With his knife, he pointed to the man in the orange tunic:

This is James Wright Foley. An American citizen of your country. As a government, you have been at the forefront of the aggression towards the Islamic State. You have plotted against us, and gone far out of your way to find reasons to interfere in our affairs …

You are no longer fighting an insurgency. We are an Islamic army and a state that has been accepted by a large number of Muslims worldwide. So effectively, any aggression towards the Islamic State is an aggression towards Muslims from all walks of life who have accepted the Islamic Caliphate as their leadership.

So any attempt by you, Obama, to deny the Muslims their rights of living in safety under the Islamic Caliphate will result in the bloodshed of your people.

And then, well, they do not show the gruesome deed. Like the makers of horror movies who understand that the most terrifying act of violence is the one that happens offscreen, they cut to an image of Foley’s headless torso lying in the sand, the knife next to him in a pool of blood, a pair of sandals tossed to the side.

The final frame showed a brief glimpse of another American, the journalist Steven Joel Sotloff. “The life of this American citizen, Obama,” the man in black says, “depends on your next decision.”²¹

It was horrifying and riveting in equal measure. The quality of the video showed sophistication and craftsmanship—a concern with aesthetics and design—like nothing we’d ever seen from al-Qaeda. The makers of this video cared about art direction, light, music, pacing—even the typography of the titles.

For ISIS, this was their Super Bowl ad. It introduced their grisly brand to an audience of millions. Within minutes, ISIS fanboys were tweeting using the hashtag #NewMessageFromISIStoUS.²² One tweeted a picture of an ISIS flag on a cell phone with an image of the White House in the background.²³ YouTube removed the Foley video three hours later, but it had already gotten hundreds of thousands of views. Highlights from it had been broadcast to millions by every global news channel.²⁴

James Foley had been kidnapped in Syria nearly two years earlier. He was a freelance journalist who had been working for Agence France-Presse. He had once worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Baghdad. He had written for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes while in Afghanistan. He had worked for the news service GlobalPost in Libya, where he had been captured by rebels and held for 44 days. Foley was a young, white American male who could have passed for one of the American soldiers in Iraq. That was the idea. Putting him in an orange tunic was meant to evoke the garb of the prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. ISIS had found their poster boy.

The Foley video transformed what had been an obscure offshoot in the world of Muslim extremism into a gigantic global brand known to billions: ISIS. The black flag. The severed head. It was meant to show them as ruthless, magnetic, messianic, and undeterred by American power. Men in black. Avengers of Sunni Islam. Holy warriors.

The video had an even more practical purpose: it was a recruitment ad for ISIS’s extreme army—ISIS’s version of the U.S. Marine Corps’ TV ads in the 1980s to recruit “a few good men.” After all, ISIS was also a volunteer army that required a steady flow of recruits. Its appeal was both religious and adventurous—if you want to lop off some American heads and go to heaven in the process, come to Iraq and Syria. Violent Islamic adventure tourism. Their proposition was zero sum—join us, or be a kafir (an apostate) and die.

This was how most Americans, and most people around the world, were introduced to ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

But ISIS was not new to CSCC. They had spotted an escalation of ISIS social media in the spring of 2014. ISIS, they informed me, already had a media arm called Al-Hayat, which a couple of weeks before had released an English-subtitled video showing young children breaking their Ramadan fast with ISIS warriors. A week later, to mark the Eid al-Fitr feast at the end of Ramadan, they had released a video that showed a mass execution of Syrians. They mixed the grisly with the G-rated. Less than a month after releasing Foley’s execution video, ISIS fighters had started a meme of fighters posing with jars of Nutella. The Nutella was meant to suggest that life in the Caliphate was sweet. It was a double-edged campaign: graphic violence to scare America and the West, and sunny travel ads to recruit foreign fighters.

I pushed CSCC to do more counter-ISIS messaging. They sent me a plan, saying their target audience was “Sunni Iraqis, pan-Arab, and global”—unfocused, but at least they were starting. They launched a series of tweets around themes of brutality, betrayal, and the limits of sectarianism. Here are a few, translated from the Arabic.

ISIS has betrayed you before, will betray you again. @CSCC @ThinkAgain_DOS

ISIS’s barbarism is its only real goal. It has no religious justification. @CSCC @ThinkAgain_DOS

The United States will not assist those who throw their lot in with ISIS. @CSCC @ThinkAgain_DOS

“Think Again, Turn Away” was CSCC’s motto. The tweets got a bit of traffic, and some responses from digital jihadis accusing CSCC of being a tool of the State Department. When we pointed out ISIS’s hypocrisy, the digital jihadis pointed out ours. @de_BlackRose tweeted: “Remember how American arrested and humiliated our brothers in Iraq,” next to a graphic image from Abu Ghraib. CSCC replied: “US troops are punished for misconduct, #ISIS fighters are rewarded.” I’m not sure CSCC changed the minds of any young men thinking of going to fight in Iraq and Syria, but it was something.

But tweeting was not going to stop ISIS from executing the other American journalist they had shown at the end of the video—like a cliff-hanger in a serial—Steven Sotloff.