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Abstract
Videos showing the Taliban on battlefields, flaunting weapons and ammunition, military capabilities and conquests by the group, or depicting suffering and casualties constitute a significant component of the Taliban’s media campaign alongside magazines, images, and taranas (anashid/vocalization). The extant literature on the Taliban’s propaganda material primarily focuses on online texts, night letters, and magazines, while less scholarly attention has been paid to their videos. This paper first identifies and analyzes the pre-dominant themes in a sample of 90 videos and then investigates the use of multimodal techniques and visual and sonic forms across a subset of 226 segments within these videos. The five predominant strategic themes identified in the Taliban videos were martyrdom, military training, military conquest, oppression and suffering, and public relations (e.g. distribution of aid to local populations, engaging with local communities). The findings point to differential use of sonic and visual forms and multimodal techniques across these five themes, pointing to strategic decisions made by the group in choosing particular techniques and forms to amplify specific strategic themes.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
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12 Friis.
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18 Kay O’Halloran and Bradley A. Smith, Multimodal Studies: Exploring Issues and Domains (Routledge, 2012).
19 O’Halloran and Smith, 2.
20 Bateman, Text and Image.
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28 Collignon et al., “Audio-Visual Integration of Emotion Expression.”
29 Carmen Daniela Maier, Constance Kampf, and Peter Kastberg, “Multimodal Analysis: An Integrative Approach for Scientific Visualizing on the Web,” Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 37, no. 4 (October 2007): 453–78, https://doi.org/10.2190/D38R-52P1-8T72-1375.
30 Kress and Leeuwen, Multimodal Discourse.
31 John Bateman and Karl-Heinrich Schmidt, Multimodal Film Analysis: How Films Mean (Routledge, 2013), 85.
32 Bateman and Schmidt, 85.
33 Kay O’Halloran, “Visual Semiosis in Film,” in Multimodal Discourse Analysis: Systemic Functional Perspectives, by Kay L O’Halloran (A&C Black, 2004).
34 Jeff Bezemer and Gunther Kress, Multimodality, Learning and Communication: A Social Semiotic Frame, 1 edition (London; New York: Routledge, 2015), 6.
35 Bezemer and Kress, 6.
36 Kress and Leeuwen, Multimodal Discourse, 3.
37 Maier, “Knowledge Communication in Green Corporate Marketing: A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of an Ecamagination Video.”
38 The number of videos that our team has collected (n = 478) is not intended to reflect the exact number of videos produced by the group as there might be other videos circulated by the group elsewhere which have not been captured and included, thus limiting their potential inclusion in the current research.
39 Based on video release data provided by a member of our research team, we observe that the Taliban’s video releases through Al Emarah have remained generally stable since August 2016. While there is variance in the number of monthly video releases, however, the Taliban’s video output has not significantly increased or decreased in the last three years.
40 This level of detailed coding generated a database of approximately 8,000 total segments and has allowed us to conduct a nuanced comparative analysis of the videos.
41 Henrik Gråtrud, “Islamic State Nasheeds As Messaging Tools,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 39, no. 12 (1 December 2016): 1050–70, https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2016.1159429.
42 Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (Columbia University Press, 1994).
43 David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art - An Introduction 8th (Eighth) Edition, 8th ed. (McGraw-Hill, 2008).
44 Long Mai et al., “Rule of Thirds Detection from Photograph,” in 2011 IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia, 2011, 91–96, https://doi.org/10.1109/ISM.2011.23; Luca Marchesotti et al., “Assessing the Aesthetic Quality of Photographs Using Generic Image Descriptors,” in 2011 International Conference on Computer Vision, 2011, 1784–91, https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCV.2011.6126444.
45 Brynjar Lia, “Doctrines for Jihadi Terrorist Training,” Terrorism and Political Violence 20, no. 4 (18 September 2008): 518–42, https://doi.org/10.1080/09546550802257226.
46 Arab Salem, Edna Reid, and Hsinchun Chen, “Multimedia Content Coding and Analysis: Unraveling the Content of Jihadi Extremist Groups’ Videos,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 31, no. 7 (July 2008): 605–26, https://doi.org/10.1080/10576100802144072.
47 This heading is based on the title of one of the Taliban’s videos.
48 Similar patterns are observed in other martyrdom videos, for example “A Warning #3”, Badri Lashkar #27.
49 Antonio Giustozzi, The Islamic State in Khorasan: Afghanistan, Pakistan and the New Central Asian Jihad: Antonio Giustozzi: 9781849049641: Amazon.Com: Gateway (London: C.Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd., 2018), https://www.amazon.com/Islamic-State-Khorasan-Afghanistan-Pakistan/dp/1849049645/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?keywords=Islamic+state+in+Khorasan&qid=1555517557&s=gateway&sr=8-1-fkmrnull; Phillip L. Hammack and Andrew Pilecki, “Narrative as a Root Metaphor for Political Psychology,” Political Psychology 33, no. 1 (2012): 75–103; Ariel Merari et al., “Making Palestinian ‘Martyrdom Operations’/‘Suicide Attacks’: Interviews With Would-Be Perpetrators and Organizers,” Terrorism and Political Violence 22, no. 1 (22 December 2009): 102–19, https://doi.org/10.1080/09546550903409403.
50 Video titled “The Conquest of Chora (Uruzgan Province).”
51 Giustozzi, The Islamic State in Khorasan: Afghanistan, Pakistan and the New Central Asian Jihad: Antonio Giustozzi: 9781849049641: Amazon.Com: Gateway.
52 David Snow and Scott Byrd, “Ideology, Framing Processes, and Islamic Terrorist Movements,” 2007, 18.
53 Snow and Byrd, 124.
54 Neil Krishan Aggarwal, The Taliban’s Virtual Emirate: The Culture and Psychology of an Online Militant Community (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).
55 Douglas L. Hintzman, “How Does Repetition Affect Memory? Evidence from Judgments of Recency,” Memory & Cognition 38, no. 1 (1 January 2010): 102–15, https://doi.org/10.3758/MC.38.1.102.
56 Dan G. Drew and Thomas Grimes, “Audio-Visual Redundancy and TV News Recall,” Communication Research 14, no. 4 (1987): 452–61, https://doi.org/10.1177/009365087014004005; Tom Grimes, “Audio-Video Correspondence and Its Role in Attention and Memory,” Educational Technology Research and Development 38, no. 3 (1 September 1990): 15–25, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02298178; Shuhua Zhou, “Effects of Visual Intensity and Audiovisual Redundancy in Bad News,” Media Psychology 6, no. 3 (1 August 2004): 237–56, https://doi.org/10.1207/s1532785xmep0603_1.
57 Nelly Lahoud, “A Cappella Songs (Anashid) in Jihadi Culture,” in Jihadi Culture: The Art and Social Practices of Militant Islamists, ed. Thomas Hegghammer (United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 42–62.
58 Thomas Hegghammer, “The Recruiter’s Dilemma: Signalling and Rebel Recruitment Tactics,” Journal of Peace Research 50, no. 1 (January 2013): 3–16, https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343312452287.
59 Gråtrud, “Islamic State Nasheeds As Messaging Tools.”
60 Mai et al., “Rule of Thirds Detection from Photograph”; Marchesotti et al., “Assessing the Aesthetic Quality of Photographs Using Generic Image Descriptors.”
61 Jewitt, The Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis.