Peter Bergen is CNN\’s national security analyst, vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is the author of \”Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden — From 9/11 to Abbottabad.\”
(CNN)On Tuesday, President Obama meets in New York with world leaders to discuss how the campaign against ISIS is going and how it might be improved.
Earlier this month, the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, said that the war is \”tactically stalemated\” and there are no \”dramatic gains on either side.\”
Here are some ideas about how to move forward:
1. Enlist defectors from ISIS to tell their stories publicly. Nothing is more powerful than hearing from former members of the group that ISIS is not creating an Islamist utopia in the areas it controls, but a hell on earth. The flow of \”foreign fighters\” to ISIS from around the Muslim world is estimated to be about 1,000 a month. Reducing that flow is a key to reducing ISIS\’ manpower.
2. Amplify voices such as that of the ISIS opposition group Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently, which routinely posts photos online of bread lines in Raqqa, the de facto capital of ISIS in northern Syria, and writes about electricity shortages in the city. This will help to undercut ISIS propaganda that it is a truly functioning state.
3. Amplify the work of former jihadists like the Canadian Mubin Shaikh, who intervenes directly with young people online who he sees are being recruited virtually by ISIS.
4. Support the work of clerics such as Imam Mohamed Magid of northern Virginia, who has personally convinced a number of American Muslims seduced by ISIS that what the group is doing is against Islam.
5. Keep up pressure on social media companies such as Twitter to enforce their own Terms of Use to take down any ISIS material that encourages violence. Earlier this year, Twitter quietly took down 2,000 accounts used by ISIS supporters, but the group continues to use Twitter and other social media platforms to propagate its message.
6. Keep up the military campaign against ISIS. The less the ISIS \”caliphate\” exists as a physical entity, the less the group can claim it is the \”Islamic State\” that it purports to be.
7. Applaud the work that the Turks have already done to tamp down the foreign fighter flow through their country to ISIS in neighboring Syria, and get them to do more.
8. Provide \”off ramps\” to young ISIS recruits with no history of violence, so that instead of serving long prison terms for attempting to join ISIS — as they presently do in the United States — they would instead serve long periods of supervised probation.
This will help families that presently face a hard choice: If they suspect a young family member is radicalizing and they go to the FBI, that person can end up in prison for up to 15 years on charges of attempting to support ISIS; but if they don\’t go to the authorities and their child ends up traveling to Syria, he or she may well end up being killed there. Providing off ramps would offer families a way out of this almost impossible choice.
Three of Shafi and Zarine Khan\’s teenaged children were arrested by the FBI last year at Chicago\’s O\’Hare Airport as they attempted to join ISIS. The Khans say they would have intervened effectively with their children if they had known they were radicalizing, but now their oldest son, Hamzah, faces 15 years in prison, despite the fact he has no history of violence nor does the government allege he was a planning a violent act.
9. Educate Muslim parents about the seductive messages that ISIS is propagating online.
10. Relentlessly hammer home the message that ISIS positions itself as the defender of Muslims, but its victims are overwhelmingly fellow Muslims.
source : thefrontierpost.com
4 Comments
AWESOME article!!!! Thank you.. everyone needs to read this, and implement this list of ideas!
There are some very good suggestions here, but it is a little worrying that some of the ideas posited have not already been implemented. Mounting a strong PR campaign to highlight the real circumstances that exist in the so-called “Caliphate” seems such an obvious move, especially as it is well known that Daesh themselves are using PR in a very effective manner.
The first 5 suggestions here seem so obvious one wonders why they have not already been initiated. It is known that many young radicalised Muslims have been sold on a false idea of what they are heading into, but view the portrayal in the West as propaganda; hearing from those who have been there, seen the reality and left must surely be the most effective way to reach them, and certainly RBSS should be more widely disseminated – none of the people I know have even heard of it.
Number 8 is also a very important point, as the way things are at the moment, friends and family of radicalised youth will not come forward if they think it will result in the persons being jailed for many years. The USA is however, and always has been, more inclined to “bring down the hammer” than to use subtler but more effective means; I think Europeean nations are more likely to adopt these methods than the USA whose first instincts in any conflict is “bomb them out of existence” – even though histroy shows that air strikes alone do nothing substantial to hurt opponents.
Suggestions 4, 9 and 10 could be very effective, as hearing from fellow Muslims will make more of an impact than standard western propaganda.
I’m not so sure about number 5 – doubtless the USA want to keep a good relationship with Turkey because it is essential for their air bases in the region, but Turkey seems to have it’s own agenda, which is not always aligned with anti-ISIS action.
Muslims should get on social media and use hadith and verses from the quran to prove is is wrong also maybe get more muslims into the security services.