Fighting Back Through Social Media

"Raqqa is not being slaughtered silently now. Because of this campaign, the whole world knows about Raqqa and the reality of ISIL."
Abu Ibrahim al-Raqqawi, Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently (RBSS) co-founder

"These activists put their lives on the line to put out vital information from the ground."
"What we don't want is just ISIS telling the story, and people in the outside world saying that there's no proof people are not happy under their rule."
Hassan Hassan, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror co-author

"We are nonviolent activists. We can't fight Daesh with weapons. We can only fight them with words."
"To defeat us, they would have to shut down the Internet. And they can't do that because all of them use the Internet."
"Any mistake means death. If you are arrested, they will kill you."
Abu Mohammed, co-founder, Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, Gaziantep

Image Credit: The Washington Post  An activist from Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Slowly at their office in Gaziantep, Turkey, speaks with an activist providing information from inside Raqqa.

If Islamic State cleverly and professionally uses social media to advance its agenda, both in inciting sectarian hatreds and in recruiting new members to its expansionary caliphate cause, while proliferating videos of its inimitable executions through atrocities received by the wider world audience as unspeakably cruel and by its potential recruits as attractively appealing, its adversaries in Islam can also hope to use the same type of media to their own advantage while disadvantaging ISIL's reputation.

If Islamic State portrays itself as rulers of an expanding caliphate within which the millions who have been exposed to their fervently fundamentalist Islamist values and who purportedly thrive under them, then the RBSS can hope to counteract that version of citizenship under ISIL by the realities seen and experienced by those actually living that life. Describing it as one devoid of human compassion, of hardship and of threats to extort from people an acceptance of the Islamist cultural rules demeaning of human rights.

Reporting from the capital of the north-central Syrian city of Raqqa that has become synonymous with Islamic State rule, covert activists leak the reality through cellphone contact of what life under ISIL is really like. With ISIL policing every facet of people's lives, stopping people randomly to check their mobile phones, detaining them if suspicions arise. Forcing women to wear burqas; in short emulating life under the Taliban in Afghanistan. A network of an estimated two dozen or so young Syrians have become anti-ISIL activists.

These are the idealistic young Sunni Syrians who originally led uprising actions against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in 2011. Those activists have now become a source of news and information about life as it is being experienced under ISIL rule. The rule that sees the religious extremists beheading their opponents, crucifying their critics, and imposing harsh punishments against those foolish enough to question their right to rule.

The group has a large Twitter following, and they post on Facebook, with over 39,000 affirmations through "like". Their target audience is the very people who are suffering under the life-and-liberty stifling rules that ISIL imposes, to give them hope, to have them feel that they aren't entirely without a voice. The group hopes also to deter aspiring foreign fighters from succumbing to the false allure that ISIL propagates through its slick propaganda campaigns.

Encrypted software is used in their communications. Dispatches are streamed through to Gaziantep , a Turkish city 300 kilometres from Syria. In Gaziantep, activists originally from Raqqa receive and post the feeds to social media. They are funded by an American non-governmental organization. They remain dedicated to overthrowing the al-Assad regime, as fully as they are committed to fighting ISIL.

Good luck with advances on both those aspirations....