‘Paris Is on Fire’

Parisians react after leaving the morgue after the terror attacks in Paris. 

Before the French authorities had even finished counting the dead, the Islamic State was already onto the next phase of its operation: not only claiming credit for Friday’s devastating attacks in Paris but rallying its supporters and taunting the enemy that there was more to come. The terrorist group’s fans online quickly followed suit. Within hours, jihadist social media was erupting with praise, boasts, and wild speculation about what else might be in store. 

On Telegram, an app that has emerged as an important distribution channel for Islamic State messages, an audio recording went up early Saturday morning. Speaking in what sounds like an American accent, an unidentified Islamic State representative announced that “a group of believers from the soldiers of the Caliphate... set out targeting the capital of prostitution and vice, the lead carrier of the cross in Europe — Paris.” The goal, he explained, was to “cast terror into the heart of the crusaders in their very own homeland.” Liberally interspersing insults — French President Francois Hollande is referred to as an “imbecile,” the attendees of a rock concert as “pagans” — the message explains that eight jihadists, armed with automatic weapons and suicide belts, set out to kill as many people as possible and didn't mind if they died in the battle.

While it inflates the death toll, claiming that “at least 200 crusaders” were killed, the message reflects how eager the Islamic State is to claim credit for attacks abroad and to offer a picture of its capabilities (it appeared on Nashir English, an official English-language Islamic State account),. As with past IS announcements, the message was quickly translated and distributed in multiple languages and on multiple platforms. IS also urged its supporters to take to Twitter and celebrate the attacks. One Arabic-language hashtag, which translated to “the State of Caliphate hits #France,” was disabled by moderators at Twitter. Another pro-IS hashtag — “Paris is on fire” — remained active as of late Saturday afternoon and had been taken up by IS supporters but also by others who condemned Islam and by Muslims who said that the attackers didn't represent their religion. Other hashtags — #parisburns, #MuslimsAreNotTerrorists — attracted thousands of messages and became trending topics. 

The use of digital media has become a familiar part of the Islamic State's playbook, but other jihadist groups paved the way. In 2005, Ayman al-Zawahiri, then the No. 2 in Al-Qaeda, said, “More than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media. We are in a media battle in a race for the hearts and minds of our umma.” (The umma is the global Muslim community.) While Al-Qaeda often relied on established outlets like Al-Jazeera to amplify its messages, its offshoots, like Jabhat Al-Nusra in Syria, have become more adept at distributing their own content. Today it's not uncommon to find jihadist social media accounts quoting what has become a sort of mantra: half of jihad is media. (The slogan has even made it onto a t-shirt.)

The implication seems to be that social media is important for spreading the group's message and communicating with supporters but also for spreading fear and confusion. Ironically, the frenetic pace and horizontal structure of many social networks has allowed jihadist groups to spread their message widely, but that same message can also be subsumed into the chaos that follows a spectacular attack like Friday's. On Twitter, for instance, it was often difficult to tell, even on IS-associated hashtags, who was posting what and for what purpose. Rumors and misinformation seemed to spread faster than they could be debunked, though some media outlets tried to do just that. And despite the Islamic State's effort to rally their base, some Arabic-language hashtags were overflowing with messages of sympathy from Muslim Twitter users. 

But for the Islamic State and its supporters, the overall message is clear. On its various Telegram channels, where it can push updates to thousands of subscribers, the Islamic State exhorted followers to think of the attackers. “#Pray for the brothers that managed to escape and still on the run,” read one message on a channel maintained by a group that calls itself Elite Section of IS. On the Khilafah News channel, a post requested that people use hashtags to divert attention to other nations: “#PrayForSyria, #PrayForIraq, “#PrayForYemen, #PrayForSomalia, #PrayForAfghanistan,” the message read, listing ten countries in total. “As for the killed kuffār [disbelievers], we don't pray for them,” the poster explained, going on to quote the Quran and then ending with the hashtag #DontPrayforParis. The message has been viewed more than 1,500 times.

Whether the scattered members of the Islamic State's digital media operation had advanced notice of these attacks is hard to glean. On Saturday, instructions were posted informing subscribers about the best ways to share IS messages, perhaps a reflection of increased traffic. The overall mood is celebratory — the Islamic State's Russian-language media shop proclaimed that they would go onward to “Rome and Andalusia” — but also, strangely, one of business as usual. After posting about the Paris attacks, some IS-connected accounts continued with what was presumably their regularly scheduled programming — sharing photos of attacks against Syrian government forces and of civilians being punished with bodily dismemberment. One set of high-quality images, posted mid-day Saturday, showed two men repairing watches in a store in Al-Shirqat, an IS-ruled town in Iraq.

On Tumblr, Chechclear — the online handle for a Dutch jihadist who blogs frequently about his life in Syria — posted a kind of valedictory poem. It opens with a remembrance of the author “picking up heads, limbs and other pieces of dead flesh of innocent Muslims blown to pieces by Coalition air strikes.” The narrator prayed for revenge, and he eventually found it. “Today is the day,” he writes. “The day in which they feel what they inflict on the Muslims here day in day out.”