Analyzing the Dabiq Magazine: The Language and the Propaganda Structure of ISIS

The Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS) still poses a significant concern worldwide due to its brutal attacks and unconventional recruitment strategy despite its recent defeat and loss of territory. ISIS distinguished itself from other notorious terrorist organizations regarding Techniques, Tactics, and Procedures (TTP). It has been observed that ISIS is highly capable of attracting foreign fighters through its improved “netwar” skills. Whereas its propaganda videos and images have been extensively analyzed, a systematic analysis of textual content is still lacking. Therefore, we examine the Dabig magazine to discover propagandist elements by performing natural language processing (NLP) and text mining methods. Namely, we first automatically detect three types of entities (person, location, organization) in each article for fifteen Dabiq issues. Then we build entity networks based on co-occurrence of entities to observe the entity relationships over time. We further employ topic modeling on all articles and calculate statistics for entities. We observe entities revolve around the term “jihad,” and the ISIS consistently seems to exploit the sources of Islam in their propaganda. The analysis also revealed that ISIS primarily targets Shiites by using derogatory language about their belief system and try to justify their attacks against them.