Islamic State

By Anne Speckhard and Ardian Shajkovci With the collapse of the so-called “Islamic State” in Iraq, and much of Syria, an immediate corresponding and steady decline occurred in ISIS’ strategic communication and online propaganda activities. However, the group’s “virtual Caliphate” is rebounding and still remains very much alive today – it continues to create new content, ...

VOX-Pol contributed to the inaugural Radicalisation Awareness Network (RAN) Civil Society Empowerment Programme (CSEP) campaigns event in Brussels this week. We therefore thought we’d share some insights from a previous RAN event focused on online CVE. [Ed.] Introduction It is an essential part of extremist propaganda and outreach to not only communicate their messages to ...

By Laurence Bindner and Raphael Gluck On April 27 2018, a Europol press release announced that new action was underway to disrupt ISIS’[1] ability to spread its propaganda online. The press release referred to an operation that commenced two days earlier, which was led by the Belgian Federal Prosecutor’s Office and coordinated with six European countries ...

By  Jennifer Yang Hui In the wake of high-profile terrorist activities in Indonesia, social media’s role in violent extremism is once again under scrutiny. The 36-hour standoff on 8 May 2018 between inmates linked to the so-called Islamic State (IS) and prison officers at Mako Brimob (the detention centre of the Indonesian National Police Mobile ...

Welcome to Vol. 5 Iss. 3 of the VOX-Pol Newsletter. If you have colleagues or friends who may be interested in the content of our newsletter, or any events or research carried out by VOX-Pol, please forward this to them and encourage them to subscribe via our website. In particular, please update any interested colleagues about ...

VOX-Pol has released its latest report in the VOX-Pol publication series, titled A Tale Of Two Caliphates: Comparing the Islamic State’s Internal and External Messaging Priorities, co-authored by Dr. Dounia Mahlouly and Charlie Winter. About the Report In recent years, the media department of the self-proclaimed Islamic State has proven itself to be highly adept at ...

By Raheel Nawaz The UK government – with considerable pomp and ceremony – recently unveiled a new online tool for detection and removal of jihadi videos boasting a high success rate. It has been claimed by the Home Office that the machine learning tool, which the government developed with ASI Data Science, can identify 94% ...

By Kiriloi M. Ingram Since the self-proclaimed Caliphate’s inception, debate amongst scholars has ensued over whether the Islamic State’s (IS’s) muhajirat (female émigrés) would become female combatants. For example, Nelly Lahoud argues that IS is unlikely to devise a policy explicitly allowing women to engage in combat, as legitimating such a role would allow women to ...

This is part one of a two-part series; the second part is HERE. By Anne Speckhard, Ardian Shajkovci, Lorand Bodo & Haris Fazliu It is estimated that of the 38,000 foreign fighters who have joined Sunni militant groups, such as ISIS and al-Nusra, in Iraq and Syria, upwards of 875 have originated from the Balkans, ...

By Maura Conway and Michael Courtney Jihadi magazines have a long pedigree, are the subject of extensive media coverage and scholarly analysis,[1] and are still easily accessible online. In a recent book chapter, ‘Online Jihadi Instructional Content: The Role of Magazines,’ Conway, Parker, and Looney,  focused on the instructional content, both text and images, published in ...