Islamophobia and Radicalization by John L. Esposito & Derya Iner

Author:John L. Esposito & Derya Iner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319952376
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Inspire and Dabiq

First published in early 2010, Inspire magazine was, at the time, a seminal addition to a growing milieu of online violent jihadist discourse. It was first produced by Samir Khan, an American citizen of Pakistani descent, who later worked on its production with Anwar Al-Awlaki, a popular Yemeni-American jihadist ideologue and AQAP’s Chief of External Operations. Due to restrictions imposed by US-led global counterterrorism efforts during this time, AQAP had begun to adopt a strategy of inspiring self-starter terrorists to conduct their own operations with no direct training, funding, or direction from the organization itself. Inspire was produced as a central limb of this strategy.

Within the academic literature and mainstream reporting, Inspire has often been interpreted as a Western-centric instrument of violent Salafi jihadi discourse. 12 Its Western Muslim target audience, anti-Western themes and calls for individualized terrorism against Western targets are the frequent subject of discussion among media, political commentators, and academic terrorism analysts. 13 Its ‘Open Source Jihad’ section, in particular, has received significant attention by academic and government researchers due to its ‘do-it-yourself’ approach to publishing instructional terrorist tactics, as well as its association with a series of terror attacks in the United States and Europe. The killing of both Samir Khan and Anwar Al-Awlaki by United states drone strikes in 2011 led to a diminishing regularity in the e-zine’s publication. However, to date there have been 17 issues produced and distributed in online PDF format, the most recent being in August 2017.

Dabiq was first published in mid-2014 by the al-Hayat (‘Life’) Media Centre, then part of IS’ growing media apparatus. Similar to Inspire, but without a focus on encouraging self-motivated terrorist attacks in the West, issues of Dabiq are typically 40–80 pages long, consisting of articles, transcribed speeches and political, religious and social commentary produced by IS affiliates and supporters. 14 The magazine generally presented the so-called IS as a divinely inspired state-building project, with an emphasis on legitimizing this project in political and religious terms, calling supporters to arms and maligning and denigrating perceived enemies. Indeed, Dabiq and Inspire’s format are broadly similar, with both e-zines publishing sections aimed at justifying a transnational violent Salafi-jihadist narrative and both often using similar titles and subtitles for articles (such as ‘From the Ages of History’ and ‘In the Words of the Enemy’). 15

Between July 2014 and July 2016, IS produced fifteen issues of Dabiq and published them online in PDF format. The e-zine lost much of its currency when IS lost control of the previously-held township of Dabiq in Syria, which is considered important in some strands of Islamic eschatology. In many ways, the loss of Dabiq highlighted IS’ loss of forward momentum in terms of territorial conquest. In September 2016, the al-Hayat Media Centre replaced it with a new e-zine publication titled Rumiyah (‘Rome’). However, since September 2017, Rumiyah’s publication also appears to have at least temporarily ceased.

Although clearly influential, neither Inspire nor Dabiq should not be read as the sole, or even the major, propaganda tool in AQ or IS’ communications toolkit.

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