Syria
Online Jihadi Storytelling: The Case of Najm al-Din Azad
February 20, 2025Despite great interest in the importance of “narrative” to the global jihadi movement, research on actual examples of jihadi storytelling has been very limited to date. In this paper, I discuss the phenomenon of jihadi storytelling, specifically in digital contexts, focusing on the case study of one storyteller in particular: “Najm al-Din Azad”, a Saudi ...
Social Network Analysis of German Foreign Fighters in Syria and Iraq
February 20, 2025Why do Westerners become foreign fighters in civil conflicts? We explore this question through original data collection on German foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq, and test three sets of hypotheses that revolve around socioeconomic integration, online radicalization, and social network mobilization. We conduct link analysis to map the network of German foreign fighters prior ...
Vital Human Rights Evidence in Syria is Disappearing from YouTube
July 16, 2024VOX-Pol Blog post. ...
A Snapshot of the Syrian Jihadi Online Ecology: Differential Disruption, Community Strength, and Preferred Other Platforms
September 18, 2023This article contributes to the growing literature on extremist and terrorist online ecologies and approaches to snapshotting these. It opens by measuring Twitter’s differential disruption of so-called “Islamic State” versus other jihadi parties to the Syria conflict, showing that while Twitter became increasingly inhospitable to IS in 2017 and 2018, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham and Ahrar ...
From Directorate of Intelligence to Directorate of Everything: The Islamic State’s Emergent Amni-Media Nexus
September 18, 2023This article, which is based on original interview data gathered from eastern Syria between January and October 2018, examines the emergent dominance of the Islamic State’s Directorate of General Security (DGS). We track how this institution, which is currently operating through a network of diwan-specific security offices grouped under the Unified Security Center (USC), has ...