Islamabad – The activists have surpassed the country by turning gaming apps, social media and AI into propaganda and recruiting weapons, proving that narrative wars are as decisive as local wars.
Last September, militants attacked a police station in the Swat area, defeating one police officer and injuring two other police officers. The attack itself is not unique – after all, SWAT is no stranger to terrorist attacks. The difference in this attack is the method of crime adopted by the radicals.
Over the next few days, investigators pieced together the clues of the attack, which they later confirmed were conducted using an IED. Regional policeman Dr Zahidullah later told dawn.
Investigator Dr. Zahidullah said he carefully studied hours of CCTV footage to identify one of the militants who gave up the names of two other suspects. However, the biggest breakthrough was during the investigation, where activists acknowledged that they never used a common communication method to connect with each other. Instead, they will communicate through the chat rooms of popular video games, the “battlefield of players Unknown” (commonly known as PUBG) to inspire new members and plan attacks. “The militants will play the role of PUBG to practice and motivate their group members to fight the country and will use chat rooms to communicate,” the DPO explained.
The revelation should raise alarms in the power corridor: local branches of terror costumes are not only using gaming platforms to recruit, but also planning attacks is worrying, given that law enforcement officers cannot access or monitor these chat rooms. However, when it comes to using digital technology, this cat and mouse chasing horror costume has become the norm – not only in Pakistan, but around the world.
Promotional tools
There was a time when radicals published newspapers, journals, posters, magazines and distributed CDs to fuel their propaganda machinery. However, in recent years, they have been using digital media as a configuration of state participants, if not more.
In addition, the transnational propaganda of militants and like-minded jihadists helped them develop advanced propaganda skills to deal with national narratives. The digital warfare was launched while clashing with the locals, underscoring the complexity of modern warfare, where state and non-state actors find themselves on the same level.
Recently, an interesting but interesting trend has emerged, with Pakistan’s state-owned social media accounts established over the past few years and are actively involved in publishing content related to armed, anti-armed propaganda and the establishment of state narratives. Meanwhile, the banned Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) appears to have launched a number of social media accounts to combat messaging in the state.
Many accounts are made from horror costumes as news and research platforms, especially on X (formerly Twitter). They often appear in blue ticks, which makes them more legitimistic and makes the audience more likely to follow them, and they in turn think that the account really represents the news and research organization.
Recently, Information Minister Attaullah Tarar, as well as several accounts linked to the country on X, posted links to the activist WhatsApp accounts, urging the platform to tear down those accounts to spread terror propaganda.
In many cases, radical propaganda is as deadly as their actual violence. With the advent of social media, the respective platforms have difficulty distinguishing between state and non-state actors, and terrorists have gained an advantage in exploiting local social dissatisfaction with the state, which in turn helps them to recruit and raise funds.
Offline and online
Currently, every radical group, whether it is the costumes of the jihadists or the separatist groups such as the Baloch insurgents, has a dedicated propaganda team. For example, TTP’s publicity team is almost entirely focused on organizing publicity work without participating in ground operations.
After the TTP, Pakistan’s Ittehad-ul-Mujahideen Pakistan (IMP) is an emerging alliance of three Pakistani jihadists, making great strides in its propaganda efforts. The latter produces high-quality multilingual content, including infographics, videos that include training and attacks, posters for specific contexts and tailor-made posters that affect target audiences, and daily updates to the alliance.
Jihadists around the world have fully developed their ability to globalize their agendas, opening the door to anyone as part of the “digital” jihad for volunteers. These volunteers are unable to interact physically, play a key role in spreading jihad propaganda, seeing it as a religious duty, and do so without expecting a monetary return, but instead use their own resources to further promote the cause of jihadists.
In this case, the ISIS and its regional membership, the ISIS Province (ISKP), is leveraging the power of digital propaganda to inspire others, from Russia to the United States, or attempt to conduct attacks on a global scale. Leveraging complex and difficult to track encrypted communications, they have expanded their coverage globally, allowing national authorities to work hard to keep pace.
That’s why global security analysts stress that winning narrative wars is as crucial as winning local wars.
The widespread emergence of social media and artificial intelligence has enabled armed groups to spread their ideology quickly and widely, transcending linguistic and geographical barriers, and reducing the cost and threat of being tracked. This allows radical organizations to remain in publicity, even with serious compromises in operation. In this case, the core goal of radical clothing remains to inspire others through publicity and ultimately restore lost power.
From game applications to secret chat rooms
Pakistani security officials insist that transnational jihadists are increasingly turning to online gaming applications as a means of secure communication aimed at evading detection.
After the experience, there are signs that they are now using the Star of Ludo to communicate to escape possible discoveries. Militants, especially transnational militants, are more skilled than domestic groups. However, these transnational groups often act as trainers, sharing their technical expertise with local groups. We face the threat of a multi-person landscape and we face a competition in our daily struggles. Pakistani security officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they did not have the right to speak with the media.
ISKP is a great example, despite severe setbacks in recent years, it has been continuing to attract recruits in a fierce publicity campaign to maintain its position as the world’s most terrifying radical clothing.
Based on intelligence input from member states, the latest report from the UN Sanctions Monitoring Team has attracted serious concerns about the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools and various communication platforms for publicity and recruitment purposes, allowing terrorist organizations to evade detection by state authorities.
“Al-Qaeda and ISIL (Aggressive ISIS in the Levant) continue to experiment with different communication platforms to glorify violence and promote ideal lives under its rule. ISIL wants to try to leverage Tiktok’s ability to reach the scope and algorithms and continue to recruit recruitment. al-qaeda has been trying to develop recruitment for recruitment. The report says applications (such as telegraph, elements, threema or Zangi) are used for missions (those) groups.
Al Qaeda’s propaganda strategy, leveraging modern tools, and then dripping into like-minded jihadists, such as TTP. Al Qaeda has long been regarded as the architect of the propaganda strategy of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Both ISKP and al-Qaeda and the latter’s local jihad allies see propaganda as an integral part of their existence, just like their operating parts.
The Pakistan War cannot fight alone
The radical groups have surpassed law enforcement agencies on multiple fronts in recent months, adopting complex propaganda strategies, adjusting revenue generation methods and often changing the operating strategies of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, while the state remains centered on traditional approaches.
In addition to digital militant out-of-disclosures including TTP and BALOCH militants among target audiences in the cyber space, a shocking trend that has emerged in recent months is the increase in physical accessibility of militants to militants to locals compared to state officials.
In areas with higher concentrations of armed concentrations, state authorities often find themselves confined to government compounds, and locals’ interactions with militants are becoming routine events, creating a great disconnect between state representatives and locals. This distance is beneficial to radicals in strengthening their physical presence and ideological propaganda through missionary work.
The threat posed by radicalism cannot be defeated by a country. Its multidimensional nature requires a collaborative approach involving multiple countries. Even the most advanced countries in the world have a hard time fighting terrorism alone, so it is unrealistic to hope that Pakistan can solve it with its meager resources.
Furthermore, the increasing use of proxy wars has become the norm in the region where hostile countries employ militants to weaken their opponents without direct confrontation, creating a dangerous cycle. This trend prompts target states to retaliate in a physical manner, thus aggravating further instability and inadvertently strengthening the threat of militants.
If Pakistan is to fight armed effectively, it must be effectively committed to establishing alliances with other countries in the region, and combine a more transnational approach designed to oppose radical propaganda and digital warfare. Now, militants are more skilled than ever when it comes to leveraging digital technology. It’s time the state catches up, too.
The author is an Islamabad-based journalist with over a decade of printing, online and television journalism. He covers extensively the armed forces, jihadist movements and other related security issues in the Afghan-Pakistan region. He is the co-founder and director of Horasan Diary News.
