After the deadly terror attack in Manchester on Monday, reports have emerged of ISIS supporters celebrating the horrific bloodshed on channels on the Telegram app. In light of these reports, The Quint is republishing this article which was originally published on 21 May, which is observed as Anti-Terrorism Day.
This investigation has been carried out in public interest to generate awareness about the means used by these vicious elements to push their violent propaganda. It is NOT to give publicity to these nefarious channels or terror organisations.
“Hi…
Muslim?”
Only a day into a structured effort to track groups on Telegram that were sharing ISIS or other Islamist terror propaganda, I received a personal message from someone calling himself ‘Mistah’. It took me a while to respond because I wasn’t sure how to. After months of reading extensively about how the process of radicalisation takes place and with no way to verify who I was speaking to, I just wasn’t sure I wanted to engage. But then I did.
“Hi. No. But interested in Islam.”
He asked if I was Filipino as I’d found my way into a Filipino channel called Kabanata Neuve, which translates to “Chapter Nine”. When I told him I was Indian, he immediately asked if I worked for the government and though I said no, it didn’t sound convincing even to myself. Mistah chose to back off.
The name of the instant messaging app Telegram has come up a lot in the news over the last year, not just in India but across the world. Often the context is its use by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) to push its radical Islamist terror agenda. Telegram Messenger is an instant messaging app known for its heavily encrypted security layers.
One of the FAQs on their website asks, “What if my hacker friend says they could decipher Telegram messages?” Telegram responds by inviting anyone to prove that claim in their competition and win $300,000.
In the post-Snowden era, while this may seem quite reassuring to the average user, it’s also a reassurance to those trying to keep their communication untraceable.
The Radicalisation Web
I set out on Telegram not to communicate with jihadis but to understand how online propaganda had the power to radicalise educated youngsters and draw them towards the hardline interpretation of Islamic jihad that ISIS espouses. Also, verifying how many of these channels are ISIS-run and how many are managed by sympathisers is a difficult, if not impossible, task.
In the context of South Asia and specifically India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, Islamist radicalisation has usually been seen as something that occurs in a madarsa or in closed meetings led by extremist preachers. But cases like that of Mehdi Masroor Biswas, a 24-year-old electrical engineer who was arrested from Bengaluru for running a pro-ISIS account that went by the handle @ShamiWitness, have changed this perception.
That ISIS is using social media to push its propaganda and recruit youngsters globally isn’t news. But the dangerously savvy way in which the terrorist organisation pursues these goals is shocking.
Propaganda is shared in accessible languages ranging from English, Arabic, French and even Urdu, Bengali, Tamil and Hindi. If it’s a video, there are options to download it in various resolutions ranging from low quality 240p to HD 1080p.
There are multiple platforms where these videos are uploaded, including file sharing sites like archive.org and even Google Drive. And in case someone can’t access a video, the audio is available as mp3 files or in text as PDFs and DOCX files as well.
A single channel often has linked channels that share the same content with other circles in different languages.
How does one join one of these Telegram channels? Through invite links that have expiry times. So if you click on a link that was sent a couple of hours earlier, chances are it won’t be active anymore. These links are widely shared on other social media platforms like Twitter as well and the expiry time means that only those actively looking out for these will click on them in time.
How the News and Telegram Networks Collide
On 22 July 2016, a shooting took place at the Olympia shopping mall in Munich, Germany. Before many media houses had sent out alerts about the breaking story, the ‘ISIS phone’ – as it had come to be called by now – had started pinging.
A group called ‘Inspire The Believers’ alerted the attack with the message “Another Lone Wolf. This time it’s in Munich, Germany, shopping centre Allah Akbar”.
Other channels also became active with one called ‘Online Dawah Operations ENGLISH’ sending out the message “Don’t worry West. You will get used to the attacks if you don’t surrender to Islamic state."
These groups seemed to be getting their information alongside the news reports while the attack was happening.
Another group called ‘Amriki Muhajer’ sent out a message to its members begging the forgiveness of Muslims living in Europe for the backlash they may have to suffer for the attack. The group said that those protesting the attack may break their windows but the blood of those fighting the jihad “is more valuable than your window”.
By next morning, the channels that usually shared updates from Amaq Agency (an ISIS-affiliated media agency that is usually the first to put out news about the terror organisation) were still silent on the Munich shooting.
Sure enough, soon after news began to trickle in that according to Munich police, the teenage gunman who had killed nine people in the shooting had researched killing sprees and had no ISIS links. They said he was “deranged” and some reports said he was depressed. But the hint that there was no ISIS connection came well before the police announced it – from the silence on Telegram.
In August 2016, at the time of the Rio Olympics, news reports started pouring in of a possible terror threat to the event from ISIS. At the same time, a Telegram channel called ‘Ansar Khilafah Brazil’ cropped up and started sending detailed instructions on how anyone could carry out a lone wolf attack. The channel sent out messages saying that the Mujahideen should “take part in the Olympics too”.
What followed were multiple points that were all suggestions on how anyone – without any institutional support from ISIS or another terror organisation – could carry out an attack with the widest possible range of effect. These “ideas” included bombings in the style of the Boston marathon bombing, knife attacks and even using drones to carry explosives.
Some days after this group went live and the international media reported the presence of an ‘ISIS cell’ in Rio, new reports came in that the Brazilian police had arrested those threatening to carry out jihadist attacks. The reports called the group ‘amateurish’. ‘Ansar Khilafah Brazil’ went silent.
But Don’t These Channels Get Shut Down?
Yes, they do. Just like Twitter accounts that tweet terror propaganda get shut down and Facebook pages sharing these messages of hatred get blocked. During the course of this investigation, several channels were shut down. In fact, I would lose access to multiple channels a week. But more would surface at the same speed. These groups have found ways of circumventing the shutdowns.
Many of the channels share links to ‘backup channels’ which have innocuous names like ‘Mexican food delivery’ or ‘Café au lait’. When you join these channels, they usually only have a single message along the lines of "Stay here In’shaa Allah." Sometimes they have a link to a third or fourth backup channel with messages like “Join our third back up in case this one down two In’shaa Allah”.
When the channel gets shut down, one of the backups gets activated.
This also means that if someone isn’t regularly clicking on these links to join the backup channels, then they lose access when the group gets taken down.
Dangerous Appeal
These Telegram channels share information in very accessible ways. The infamous article from al Qaeda’s Inspire magazine called ‘Make a bomb in the kitchen of your Mom’ by ‘The AQ Chef’ was shared repeatedly on several of these chat channels.
The channels share graphic images and trumped-up data about the activities of ISIS. They regularly share images of happy-looking people going about their daily lives against the background of clean ISIS-controlled cities to attract recruits to the region. The idea is to say, “Look at us, we’re so happy in the Khilafah. You should join us.”
These channels are actively trying to counteract the information being put out in the public domain by media networks and governments about the brutality of ISIS.
But amidst the smiling faces of ISIS fighters mingling with the people they rule, the channels also share gruesome images of those killed in the battles and glamour shots of firing guns and cannons.
While I can’t be sure that ‘Mistah’ was a terrorist or an ISIS supporter, it is often personalised interactions like these that lure young people into the disturbing spiral of terrorist propaganda.
The dark side of one of the most secure instant messaging apps on the market poses a huge challenge to counter-terrorism and counter-radicalisation experts, policymakers and security forces globally.
(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)