But the glue that holds the disparate branches together – and also helps to inspire “lone wolf” terrorists such as Jabbar who carry out their own attacks – is the Islamic State group’s sophisticated media operation. Experts say that although it is doubtful the media operation has a physical headquarters, it is highly centralised and controlled by its media directorate. Much of its output appears to come from affiliates in Africa, which have recently been the most active in terms of attacks.
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The group also puts out an online weekly newsletter called Al Naba, or The News, which contains details of the group’s latest exploits, implicitly encouraging followers to commit acts of violence.
“The Al Naba newsletter comes out like clockwork every Thursday, which is one of the more impressive things that the group is able to do,” said Cole Bunzel, a scholar of militant Islam in the Middle East at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in California.
“They have an editorial; they cover the different provinces, as they’re called; they cover attacks from that week. They tally up the number of attacks and casualties that they claim. And that’s the main way that they stay connected with their global support base,” he said.
The most recent edition of the newsletter, published on Thursday, did not mention the New Orleans attack, and the Islamic State group has not claimed responsibility for it.
Al Naba was initially published through the messaging app Telegram and other platforms, constantly adapting as different channels were shut down, said Aaron Zelin, a Washington Institute fellow who has tracked the activities and propaganda of Islamist groups for more than 15 years.
Supporters of the group have also disseminated messages on Twitter, Facebook pages and other social media platforms, researchers say. When their user profiles are blocked, they often just create new ones. The Islamic State group has used decentralised internet tools that are harder to shut down and moved some of its messaging to the dark web, Zelin said.
Terrorism analysts say it has been easy for extremists to connect with potential supporters on social media because of the lack of effort both by some of the companies that operate the platforms and by governments to force a crackdown.
Terrorism experts say the Islamic State group’s mastery of media and message is a key to its success. Al-Qaeda, which the Islamic State group split from in 2013, laid the groundwork, publishing online and print magazines and producing videos as well as social media.
‘Kill them wherever you find them’
Last January, the extremist group revived a campaign directed at its global adherents: “kill them wherever you find them”, a reference to a verse in the Koran.
The idea, which first surfaced in 2015, was to encourage would-be followers to commit acts of jihad at home rather than travelling to Iraq and Syria. That notion became even more important once the caliphate was defeated.
During the period when the Islamic State group held ground in Syria and then Iraq (2013-17) and was eager to gain adherents in the West, it was notorious for posting grisly depictions of violence, such as the beheading of photojournalist James Wright Foley.
Now, experts say an increasingly daunting challenge is that social media platforms are doing much of the work of spreading Islamic State group’s message, as algorithms that seek to boost engagement take some users deeper and deeper into the extremist worldview.
“Terror groups don’t have to make a ton of effort to radicalise people any more; the algorithm does it for them,” Schindler said. “The point of the algorithm is to keep the user on the platform, to give them what they like, and if this happens to be Islamic extremism or if you are in the radicalisation process, your worldview shifts.”
On the ground in Syria
In Syria, where the Islamic State group took advantage of a long civil war to seize a large swath of territory, only to lose it eventually to US-backed fighters, the group has begun to rebound, accelerating its attacks. That trend might continue because the regime of president Bashar al-Assad was suddenly toppled in December by another extremist group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which was once associated with the Islamic State group and al-Qaeda.
The situation is still fluid, but some analysts fear that the Islamic State group could regain ground amid the chaos. The group’s newsletter has spoken dismissively of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) as “jihadists turned politicians”, but has not called for attacks on them.
Meanwhile, HTS and other rebel groups say they should take over the role of guarding Islamic State group prisoners in eastern Syria and manage the camps holding about 40,000 Islamic State group fighters and family members – a job that has been done for nearly five years by the Kurdish-led Syrian Defence Forces, backed by the United States. Many terrorism experts question how Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which once had links to Islamic State but then bitterly separated, might carry out the mission of suppressing it.
The Islamic State group recently renewed its “Breaking the Walls” media campaign, which encourages the imprisoned fighters to break out of the jails in eastern Syria and free their families.
If that succeeds, Zelin said, it would be a “disaster”.