DUBAI: As the Islamic State group battles across Syria and Iraq, pushing back larger armies and ruling over entire cities, it is also waging an increasingly sophisticated media campaign that has rallied disenfranchised youth and outpaced the sluggish efforts of Arab governments to stem its appeal.

Long gone are the days when militant leaders like Osama bin Laden smuggled grainy videos to Al Jazeera. Nowadays Islamic State backers use Twitter, Facebook and other online platforms to entice recruits with professionally made videos showing fighters waging holy war and building an Islamic utopia. The extremist group’s opponents say it is dragging the region back into the Middle Ages with its grisly beheadings and massacres, but its tech-savvy media strategy has exposed the ways in which Arab governments and mainstream religious authorities seem to be living in the past.

Most Arab governments see social media as a threat to their stability and have largely failed to harness its power, experts say. Instead, they have tried to monitor and censor the Internet while churning out stale public statements and state-approved sermons on stuffy government-run media.

Last week, Saudi Arabia’s top council of religious scholars issued a lengthy Arabic statement via the state-run news agency denouncing terrorism and calling on citizens to back efforts to fight extremist groups like the Islamic State and Al Qaida.

Leading Sunni Muslim authorities in Egypt have issued similar government-backed statements. Compare that to the Islamic State group. Its Furqan media arm produces slick videos complete with interviews, graphics and jihadist hymns echoing in the background, with Arabic and English subtitles.

It promotes the videos and its glossy monthly magazines on an array of social media, reaching out to people in the Arab world and beyond. Islamic State fighters even tweet live from the battlefield, giving real-time updates and waging theological debates with online detractors.

“They definitely have an electronic army behind them,” said Ray Kafity, vice president of FireEye for the Middle East, Turkey and Africa.

The company manufactures IT solutions for defending against cyber threats. The Islamic State boasts thousands of foreign fighters, some of whom were first drawn to it in the privacy and security of cyberspace. It also uses social media for fundraising.

Fadi Salem, a Dubai-based researcher on Internet governance in the Arab World, said the immediate response of Middle Eastern governments to the power of social media has been to “control, block and censor as much as possible.”

“Very few governments viewed this as an opportunity rather than a risk,” Salem said. Egypt shut down access to the Internet during the bloodiest day of the 2011 uprising that toppled President Hosni Mubarak, and Syria cut off access in rebellious provinces shortly after the start of the revolt against Bashar Assad later that spring.Iraq’s government followed suit in June of this year, when the Islamic State group swept across much of the country’s north and west.

The government cut off Internet access to several areas overrun by militants, including Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city. A study by The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto showed that despite blocking mobile messaging apps and social media platforms, Iraq’s authorities failed to block seven websites affiliated with or supportive of the Islamic State group.

New accounts appear almost as quickly as old accounts are reported and taken down. “It’s hard to wage a war with ideas online,” said Abdulaziz Al-Mulhem, the spokesman for the Saudi Ministry of Information and Culture.

“When we talk about monitoring or controlling social media it is like trying to control air, and this of course is hard. “Facebook says it has 71 million active monthly users in the Middle East, and youth between the ages of 15 and 29 make up around 70 per cent of Facebook users in the Arab region, according to a report by the Dubai School of Government.Facebook’s Elizabeth Linder says Middle Eastern governments are still in the early stages of realizing the full potential of social media.

Published in Dawn, September 22nd, 2014