Abstract
The Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS) still poses a significant concern worldwide due to its brutal attacks and unconventional recruitment strategy despite its recent defeat and loss of territory. ISIS distinguished itself from other notorious terrorist organizations regarding Techniques, Tactics, and Procedures (TTP). It has been observed that ISIS is highly capable of attracting foreign fighters through its improved “netwar” skills. Whereas its propaganda videos and images have been extensively analyzed, a systematic analysis of textual content is still lacking. Therefore, we examine the Dabig magazine to discover propagandist elements by performing natural language processing (NLP) and text mining methods. Namely, we first automatically detect three types of entities (person, location, organization) in each article for fifteen Dabiq issues. Then we build entity networks based on co-occurrence of entities to observe the entity relationships over time. We further employ topic modeling on all articles and calculate statistics for entities. We observe entities revolve around the term “jihad,” and the ISIS consistently seems to exploit the sources of Islam in their propaganda. The analysis also revealed that ISIS primarily targets Shiites by using derogatory language about their belief system and try to justify their attacks against them.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsReferences
Packer, G. Why did ISIS murdered Kenji Goto. The New Yorker (2015). https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/isis-murdered-kenji-goto. Accessed 3 Aug 2018
Wong, K.: Five ways ISIS, al Qaeda differ (2016). http://thehill.com/policy/defense/218387-five-ways-isis-is-different-than-al-qaeda. Accessed 3 Aug 2018
Koerner, B.I.: Why ISIS is winning the social media war? Wired (2016). https://www.wired.com/2016/03/isis-winning-social-media-war-heres-beat/. Accessed 3 Aug 2018
Brandon, C.: What does Dabiq do? ISIS hermeneutics and organizational fractures within Dabiq magazine. Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 0(0), 1–18 (2016)
Ingram, H.J.: An analysis of Islamic State’s Dabiq magazine. Aust. J. Polit. Sci. 51(3), 458–477 (2016)
Zimmerman, K.: America’s Real Enemy: The Salafi-Jihadi Movement. American Enterprise Institute (2017). https://www.criticalthreats.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Zimmerman_Americas-Real-Enemy-The-Salafi-Jihadi-Movement.pdf. Accessed 13 Aug 2018
Thompson, R.L.: Radicalization and the use of social media. J. Strat. Secur. 4(4), 9 (2011)
Al-Tabaa, E.S.: Targeting a female audience: american muslim women’s perceptions of Al-Qaida propaganda. J. Strat. Secur. 6(5), 4 (2013)
Fink, N.C., Sugg, B.: A tale of two jihads: comparing the Al-Qaeda and ISIS narratives. IPI Glob. Obs. 9 (2015)
Byman, D., Al Qaeda, the islamic state, and the global jihadist movement: what everyone needs to know. What Everyone Needs To Know (2015)
Groll, E., Francis, D.: Osama bin Laden Would Not Have Taken Ramadi (2015). http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/05/20/osama-bin-laden-would-not-have-taken-ramadi/. Accessed 3 Aug 2018
Bunzel, C.: From Paper State to Caliphate: The Ideology of Islamic State. The Brookings Project on US Relations with the Islamic World. Analysis Paper No 19 (2015)
Bertrand, N. We’re getting to know just how different ISIS is from al Qaeda (2015). http://www.businessinsider.com/difference-between-isis-and-al-qaeda-2015-5. Accessed 3 Aug 2018
Liu, E.: Al Qaeda Electronic: A Sleeping Dog? The Critical Threats Project of the American Enterprise Institute, no. 12 (2015). https://www.criticalthreats.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Al_Qaeda_Electronic-1.pdf. Accessed 3 Aug 2018
Faiola, A., Mekhennet, S.: From hip-hop to jihad. How the Islamic State became a magnet for converts. The Washington Post 6 (2015)
Ford, T.: How Daesh uses language in the domain of religion. Mil. Rev. 96(2), 16 (2016)
From Hypocrisy to Apostasy. The Extinction of the Grayzone, in Dabiq
Clarion Project. http://www.clarionproject.org/news/islamic-state-isis-isil-propaganda-magazine-dabiq. Accessed 20 Feb 2016
Finkel, J.R., Grenager, T., Manning, C.: Incorporating non-local information into information extraction systems by Gibbs sampling. In: Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics. Association for Computational Linguistics (2005)
Blei, D.M., Ng, A.Y., Jordan, M.I.: Latent Dirichlet allocation. J. Mach. Learn. Res. 3, 993–1022 (2003)
Alaaldin, R.: The ISIS campaign against Iraq’s Shia Muslims is not politics. It’s genocide. Guardian, 5 January 2017
McCallum, A.K., Mallet: a machine learning for language toolkit (2002)
Coaty, P.: Understanding the War on Terror, 3rd edn. Kendall Hunt Publishing, Dubuque (2012)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Bisgin, H., Arslan, H., Korkmaz, Y. (2019). Analyzing the Dabiq Magazine: The Language and the Propaganda Structure of ISIS. In: Thomson, R., Bisgin, H., Dancy, C., Hyder, A. (eds) Social, Cultural, and Behavioral Modeling. SBP-BRiMS 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11549. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21741-9_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21741-9_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-21740-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-21741-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)