https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1699-2684
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Abstract
Recognizing the importance of the Arabic publication for reaching a key target audience for ISIS, this expansive study of al-Naba’s text-based content will add to the scholarship of non-state actor communication using a mixed methodology of unsupervised machine learning and rhetorical analysis. First, it uses the ANTMN methodology to identify the frequency of the top Arabic thematic word clusters. Second, through time series and regression analysis, it adds to contemporary attention theories related to extremist group propaganda by uncovering what environmental factors correspond to changes in thematic emphasis. Third, it reveals the methodological steps necessary to improve evaluations of non-English large data discourse corpora.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the Reviewers and the Editors for taking the time and effort necessary to review the manuscript, we sincerely appreciate all the valuable comments and suggestions, which guided us to improve the manuscript. We would also like to thank Dror Walter and Craig Whiteside for their guidance and support throughout the project.
Data Availability Statement
The data for replicability of the regression models is available in "Replication Data for: Textual Messaging of ISIS’s al-Naba and the Context Drivers that Correspond to Strategic Changes", https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/FAP771. The code for the analysis is at the corresponding author’s GitHub repository: https://github.com/aysedeniz09/ThematicClusters. We will not make the text of al-Naba publicly available due to its violent extremist content. However, the site can be made available upon individual request to the corresponding author.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Anthony J. Blinken, “Secretary Antony J. Blinken Opening Remarks at D-ISIS Meeting Opening Session,” Rome, Italy, 28 June 2021, https://www.state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-opening-remarks-at-d-isis-meeting-opening-session/.
2 For example, see “Attack: Bombing at Baghdad Market Kills Eid Shoppers,” BBC News, 19 June 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-57895957.
3 “Iraq Attack: Bombing at Baghdad Market Kills Eid Shoppers,” BBC News, 19 June 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-57895957.
4 al-Naba, “Soldiers of Harvest,” Al-Naba, 5 May 2022.
5 Tom Negovan, “ISIS Calls for Attacks in Europe, Israel,” NewsNation (blog), 20 April 2022, https://www.newsnationnow.com/prime/isis-calls-for-attacks-in-europe-israel/.
6 Daniel Milton, Communication Breakdown: Unraveling the Islamic States Media Efforts (West Point, NY: Countering Terrorism Center, 2016); Daniel Milton, Down, But Not Out: An Updated Examination of the Islamic State’s Visual Propaganda (West Point, NY: Combating Terrorism Center, 24 July 2018); Carol Winkler and Kareem El Damanhoury, Proto-State Media Systems: Al-Qaeda and ISIS as Exemplars (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).
7 Early unofficial versions of al-Naba began in May 2010. Other iterations included annual issues that documented the activities of militant activities and weekly instalments without the official logo of the publication. Beginning on October 19, 2015, the group began distributing offline issues, which included the official logos and on December 17, 2015, the group distributed the publication online. For more on the history of al-Naba, see Winkler, El-Damanhoury, and Lemieux, 2018.
8 Brian Dodwell, Daniel Milton, and Don Rassler, The Caliphate’s Global Workforce: An Inside Look at the Islamic State’s Foreign Fighter Paper Trail (West Point, NY: Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, April 2016), https://www.ctc.usma.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/CTC_Caliphates-Global-Workforce-Report.pdf.
9 We would like to make clear that we are not claiming causality between certain environmental factors and changes in ISIS’s newsletter topics. As with most, if not all, communications, a multitude of context factors, audience peculiarities, and communicator motivations create a complex set of factor interactions, making the identification of any single cause a daunting, if not impossible, task. Nonetheless, identifying message pattern changes over time can lead to better-informed analyses of the group’s likely reactions to future events and how to proactively respond to them.
10 The Boolean search terms used for English publications is ALL=(("Islamic State of Iraq and Syria" OR DAESH OR "Islamic State") AND ("Dabiq" OR "Rumiyah")), and for Arabic publications is ALL=(("Islamic State of Iraq and Syria" OR DAESH OR "Islamic State") AND ("al-Naba" OR "Naba Newspaper")), the search was first conducted in August 10th, 2021 and repeated in July 22nd, 2022. The link for the search queries for each search are: https://www.webofscience.com/wos/woscc/summary/34de317a-7ed8-413f-8302-2712daf82c3e-451f6ab7/relevance/1; and, https://www.webofscience.com/wos/woscc/summary/0f29c5bd-4b76-4cb7-adbb-dbd2b567b2e7-451f729e/relevance/1
11 Juline Beaujouan, “Investigating the Influence of Islamic State’s Discourse in Jordan,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 20 May 2021, 3, https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2021.1926070.
12 Carol Winkler, Kareem El Damanhoury, Aaron Dicker, and Anthony F. Lemieux, “Images of Death and Dying in ISIS Media: A Comparison of English and Arabic Print Publications,” Media, War & Conflict, 10 January 2018, 175063521774620, https://doi.org/10.1177/1750635217746200.
13 Nagham El Karhili, John Hendry, Wojciech Kaczkowski, Kareem El Damanhoury, Aaron Dicker, and Carol K. Winkler, “Islamic/State Daesh’s Visual Negotiation of Institutional Positioning,” Journal of Media and Religion 20, no. 2 (3 April 2021): 79–104, https://doi.org/10.1080/15348423.2021.1930813.
14 Carol Winkler, Lindsey Dewick, Yennhi Luu, and Wojciech Kaczkowski, “Dynamic/Static Image Use in ISIS’s Media Campaign: An Audience Involvement Strategy for Achieving Goals,” Terrorism and Political Violence 33, no. 6 (29 May 2019): 1323–41, https://doi.org/10.1080/09546553.2019.1608953.
15 Wojciech Kaczkowski, Carol Winkler, Kareem El Damanhoury, and Yennhi Luu, “Intersections of the Real and the Virtual Caliphates: The Islamic State’s Territory and Media Campaign,” Journal of Global Security Studies 6, no. 2 (28 April 2020): 1–15, https://doi.org/10.1093/jogss/ogaa020.
16 Kareem El Damanhoury, “The Visual Depiction of Statehood in Daesh’s Dabiq Magazine and al-Naba’ Newsletter,” in Networking Argument, ed. Carol Winkler (New York: Routledge, 2019), 224–9.
17 Carol Winkler, Kayla McMinimy, Kareem El Damanhoury, and Monerah Almahmoud, “Shifts in the Visual Media Campaigns of AQAP and ISIS after High Death and High Publicity Attacks,” Behavioral Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression, 14 May 2020, 1–14, https://doi.org/10.1080/19434472.2020.1759674.
18 Kayla McMinimy, Carol K. Winkler, Ayse Deniz Lokmanoglu, and Monerah Almahmoud, “Censoring Extremism: Influence of Online Restriction on Official Media Products of ISIS,” Terrorism and Political Violence (10 November 2021): 1–17, https://doi.org/10.1080/09546553.2021.1988938.
19 Ayse Deniz Lokmanoglu, Carol K. Winkler, Kayla McMinimy, and Monerah Almahmoud, “ISIS Media and Troop Withdrawal Announcements: Visualizing Community and Resilience,” International Journal of Communication 16 (January 1, 2022): 215–46.
20 Carol Winkler, Kareem El Damanhoury, and Anthony F. Lemieux, “Validating Extremism: Strategic Use of Authority Appeals in al-Naba’ Infographics,” Journal of Argumentation in Context 7, no. 1 (2018): 33–71, https://doi.org/10.1075/jaic.17014.win.
21 Rebecca A. Adelman, “One Apostate Run over, Hundreds Repented: Excess, Unthinkability, and Infographics from the War with I.S.I.S.,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 35, no. 1 (January 2018): 57–73, https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2017.1393100.
22 Nur Aziemah Azman, “Islamic State’s Narratives of Resilience and Endurance,” Counter Terrorist Trends and Analyses 12, no. 1 (January 2020): 82–6.
23 Michael Glausch, “Infographics and Their Role in the IS Propaganda Machine,” Contemporary Voices: St Andrews Journal of International Relations 1, no. 3 (December 9, 2019): 32, https://doi.org/10.15664/jtr.1492.
24 Marwan Ahmed Sulaiman Shehadeh, “The Media Frameworks Used to Address the Issues in The Editorials of The Al-Naba Weekly Newspaper,” Journal of Al-Frahedis Arts 13, no. 45 (2021): 205–28.
25 Ayse Lokmanoglu, “Imagined Economics: An Analysis of Non-State Actor Economic Messaging” (Dissertation, Georgia State University, 10 August 2021), https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/communication_diss/102.
26 Dounia Mahlouly and Charlie Winter, “A Tale of Two Caliphates: Comparing the Islamic State’s Internal and External Messaging Priorities,” VOX-Pol Publication (VOX-Pol Network of Excellence, 2018); Beaujouan, “Investigating the Influence of Islamic State’s Discourse in Jordan.”
27 Beaujouan, “Investigating the Influence of Islamic State’s Discourse in Jordan.”
28 Mehdi Laghmari, “Situating Islamic State’s Message: A Social and Theological Genealogy,” in ISIS Propaganda: A Full-Spectrum Extremist Message, ed. Stephane J. Baele, Katharine A. Boyd, and Travis G. Coan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 50–83, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190932459.003.0003.
29 Charlie Winter, “Making Sense of the Islamic State’s Post-Territorial (d)Evolution: From ‘Remaining and Expanding’ to ‘Erosion and Struggle,’” in Salafi-Jihadism and Digital Media (Routledge, 2022).
30 Adib Abdulmajid, “Discourse and Terrorism: Religionization, Politicization and the Incitement of Sectarian Conflicts,” Perspectives on Terrorism 16, no. 3 (2022): 50–61.
31 Weeda Mehran, Dominika Imiolek, Lucy Smeddle, and Jack Springett-Gilling, “The Depiction of Women in Jihadi Magazines: A Comparative Analysis of Islamic State, Al Qaeda, Taliban and Tahrik-e Taliban Pakistan,” Small Wars & Insurgencies 33, no. 3 (3 April 2022): 382–408, https://doi.org/10.1080/09592318.2020.1849898.
32 For example Andrew Boutton, “Military Aid, Regime Vulnerability and the Escalation of Political Violence,” British Journal of Political Science 51, no. 2 (April 2021): 507–25, https://doi.org/10.1017/S000712341900022X; Eltigani Abdelgadir Hamid, “The Politics of the Two Qiblahs and the Emergence of an Alternative Islamic Monotheism,” American Journal of Islam and Society 33, no. 1 (1 January 2016): 67–91, https://doi.org/10.35632/ajiss.v33i1.231; Haroro J. Ingram, Craig Whiteside, and Charlie Winter, ISIS Reader: Milestone Texts of the Islamic State Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020); Alyssa Sims, “The Rising Drone Threat from Terrorists,” Georgetown Journal of International Affairs 19, no. 1 (2018): 97–107, https://doi.org/10.1353/gia.2018.0012; Amira Jadoon, “Operational Convergence or Divergence? Exploring the Influence of Islamic State on Militant Groups in Pakistan,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism (11 April 2022): 1–25, https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2022.2058374; Gunnar Weimann, Beatrice Berton, and Antonios Samouris, “IS’s Global Digital Arenas: Strategy and Platforms,” in Salafi-Jihadism and Digital Media (Routledge, 2022).
33 Michael Calvin McGee, “The ‘Ideograph’: A Link between Rhetoric and Ideology,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 66, no. 1 (February 1980): 1–16, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335638009383499.
34 For example, see Celeste Michelle Condit and John Louis Lucaites, Crafting Equality: America’s Anglo-African Word, New Practices of Inquiry (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993); John Louis Lucaites and Celeste Michelle Condit, “Reconstructing: Culturetypal and Counter-Cultural Rhetorics in the Martyred Black Vision,” Communication Monographs 57, no. 1 (1990): 5; Carol Winkler, In the Name of Terrorism: Presidents on Political Violence in the Post-World War, SUNY Series in the Trajectory of Terror (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2006).
35 Ayse Lokmanoglu, “Coin as Imagined Sovereignty: A Rhetorical Analysis of Coins as a Transhistorical Artifact and an Ideograph in Islamic State’s Communication,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 44, no. 1 (16 July 2020): 1–22, https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2020.1793458.
36 Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 169.
37 Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).
38 Burke, 20.
39 Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form; Bettina Heinz and Ronald Lee, “Getting down to the Meat: The Symbolic Construction of Meat Consumption,” Communication Studies 49, no. 1 (March 1998): 86–99, https://doi.org/10.1080/10510979809368520.
40 Gabriel Weimann, “The Theater of Terror: The Psychology of Terrorism and the Mass Media,” Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma 9, no. 3–4 (18 April 2005): 379–90, https://doi.org/10.1300/J146v09n03_08.
41 Winkler and Damanhoury, Proto-State Media Systems: Al-Qaeda and ISIS as Exemplars.
42 Ryan D Griffiths, Age of Secession the International and Domestic Determinants of State Birth, 2018, https://www.vlebooks.com/vleweb/product/openreader?id=none&isbn=9781316676479; Brynjar Lia, “Understanding Jihadi Proto-States,” Perspectives on Terrorism 9, no. 4 (2015): 31–41.
43 Winkler and Damanhoury, Proto-State Media Systems: Al-Qaeda and ISIS as Exemplars, 8.
44 Winkler and Damanhoury, 113–48.
45 Ibid., 179–84.
46 Burke, Counter-Statement.
47 Github Repository, “Tesseract Open Source OCR Engine (Main Repository),” C++ (2014; repr., tesseract-ocr, April 26, 2020), https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract.
48 Previous sources recommend the use of arabicStemR for such analyses. See Rich Nielsen, ArabicStemR: Arabic Stemmer for Text Analysis, version 1.2, 2017, https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=arabicStemR; for previous studies see for example: Alghamdi and Selamat, “Topic Modelling Used to Improve Arabic Web Pages Clustering”; Siddiqui, Faraz, and Sattar, “Discovering the Thematic Structure of the Quran Using Probabilistic Topic Model.”
49 Alghamdi and Selamat, “Topic Modelling Used to Improve Arabic Web Pages Clustering”; Siddiqui, Faraz, and Sattar, “Discovering the Thematic Structure of the Quran Using Probabilistic Topic Model.”
50 Dror Walter, Yotam Ophir, Ayse D. Lokmanoglu, and Meredith L. Pruden, “Vaccine Discourse in White Nationalist Online Communication: A Mixed-Methods Computational Approach,” Social Science & Medicine 298 (1 April 2022): 114859, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.114859; Yotam Ophir, Meredith L. Pruden, Dror Walter, Ayse D. Lokmanoglu, Catherine Tebaldi, and Rui Wang, “Weaponizing Reproductive Rights: A Mixed-Method Analysis of White Nationalists’ Discussion of Abortions Online,” Information, Communication & Society, 27 June 2022, 1–26, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2022.2077654.
51 Daniel Maier, Annie Waldherr, Peter Miltner, Patrick Jähnichen, and Barbara Pfetsch, “Exploring Issues in a Networked Public Sphere: Combining Hyperlink Network Analysis and Topic Modeling,” Social Science Computer Review 36, no. 1 (2018): 93, https://doi.org/10.1177/0894439317690337.
52 Maier et al., 94.
53 Margaret E Roberts, Brandon M Stewart, and Dustin Tingley, “Stm: R Package for Structural Topic Models,” Journal of Statistical Software 91, no. 2 (2019): 42.
54 Dror Walter and Yotam Ophir, “News Frame Analysis: An Inductive Mixed-Method Computational Approach,” Communication Methods and Measures, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1080/19312458.2019.1639145.
55 We utilized a 5-fold cross-validation iterated over a range of topic numbers from 2 to 60 and different levels of the alpha hyperparameter from α = 0.01 to α = 0.5; see for example: Dror Walter, Yotam Ophir, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, “Russian Twitter Accounts and the Partisan Polarization of Vaccine Discourse, 2015–2017,” American Journal of Public Health 110, no. 5 (May 2020): 718–24, https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2019.305564. For the code and visualization please refer to < githublink > [anonymized for review].
56 Walter and Ophir, “News Frame Analysis: An Inductive Mixed-Method Computational Approach.”
57 M. A. Serrano, M. Boguna, and A. Vespignani, “Extracting the Multiscale Backbone of Complex Weighted Networks,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, no. 16 (21 April 2009): 6483–88, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0808904106.
58 Vincent D Blondel, Jean-Loup Guillaume, Reneaud Lambiotte, and Etienne Lefebvre,, “Fast Unfolding of Communities in Large Networks,” Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment 10 (2008): 1–12, https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-5468/2008/10/P10008.
59 Winkler and Damanhoury, Proto-State Media Systems: Al-Qaeda and ISIS as Exemplars.
60 John L. Esposito, “Id Al-Fitr,” in The Oxford Dictionary of Islam, Oxford Islamic Studies Online, accessed February 11, 2021, http://www.oxfordislamicstudies.com/opr/t125/e970; John L. Esposito, “Id Al-Adha,” in The Oxford Dictionary of Islam, Oxford Islamic Studies Online, http://www.oxfordislamicstudies.com/opr/t125/e969 (accessed 11 February 2021).
61 IslamicFinder, “Islamic Calendar 2021 - Hijri 1442 to Gregorian Calendar 2021,” IslamicFinder, 2021, https://www.islamicfinder.org/islamic-calendar/.
62 “Jewish / Hebrew Date Converter - Use This Powerful Tool to Look up Any Regular / Gregorian Calendar Date and Convert It to Its Corresponding Jewish Date, or Vice Versa.,” Chabad.org, 22 August 2021, https://www.chabad.org/calendar/converter_cdo/aid/6225/jewish/Jewish-Hebrew-Date-Converter.htm.
63 U.S. Central Command, “Operation Inherent Resolve Strike Releases,” Strike Releases (Operation Inherent Resolve, 2021), https://www.inherentresolve.mil/Releases/Strike-Releases/.
64 Airwars, “US-Led Coalition Air Strikes on ISIS in Iraq & Syria, 2014–2018,” 2021, https://airwars.org/conflict-data/coalition-declared-strikes-timeline/.
65 Live Universal Awareness Map (“Liveuamap”), “Liveuamap Company,” 2021, https://isis.liveuamap.com/about#world.
66 Kaczkowski et al., “Intersections of the Real and the Virtual Caliphates”; Lokmanoglu, “Imagined Economics.”
67 Zening Duan, Jianing Li, Josephine Lukito, Kai-Cheng Yang, Fan Chen, Dhavan V. Shah, and Sijia Yang,, “Algorithmic Agents in the Hybrid Media System: Social Bots, Selective Amplification, and Partisan News about COVID-19,” Human Communication Research, 17 May 2022, hqac012, https://doi.org/10.1093/hcr/hqac012; John R. Freeman, John T. Williams, and Tse-min Lin, “Vector Autoregression and the Study of Politics,” American Journal of Political Science 33, no. 4 (November 1989): 842, https://doi.org/10.2307/2111112; Yotam Ophir, Dror Walter, Daniel Arnon, Ayse Lokmanoglu, Michele Tizzoni, Joëlle Carota, Lorenzo D’Antiga, and Emanuele Nicastro, “The Framing of COVID-19 in Italian Media and Its Relationship with Community Mobility: A Mixed-Method Approach,” Journal of Health Communication 26, no. 3 (4 March 2021): 161–73, https://doi.org/10.1080/10810730.2021.1899344.
68 D. F. Findley, “On the Unbiasedness Property of AIC for Exact or Approximating Linear Stochastic Time Series Models,” Journal of Time Series Analysis 6, no. 4 (July 1985): 229–52, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9892.1985.tb00412.x.
69 Helmut Lütkepohl, “Impulse Response Function,” in Macroeconometrics and Time Series Analysis, ed. Steven N. Durlauf and Lawrence E. Blume (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2010), 145–50, https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230280830_16.
70 Duan et al., “Algorithmic Agents in the Hybrid Media System.”
71 Nico Prucha, “Part 6: Substituting the Jihadist Twittersphere for Islamic State Telegrams,” Online Jihad: Monitoring Jihadist Online Communities (blog), 10 October 2017, https://onlinejihad.net/2017/10/10/part-5-substituting-the-jihadist-twittersphere-for-islamic-state-telegrams/; Europol, “Islamic State Propaganda Machine Hit by Law Enforcement in Coordinated Takedown Action,” Europol, 27 April 2018, https://www.europol.europa.eu/newsroom/news/islamic-state-propaganda-machine-hit-law-enforcement-in-coordinated-takedown-action; Europol, “Europol and Telegram Take on Terrorist Propaganda Online,” Europol, 25 November 2019, https://www.europol.europa.eu/newsroom/news/europol-and-telegram-take-terrorist-propaganda-online.
72 Bardia Rahmani and Andrea Tanco, “ISIS’s Growing Caliphate: Profiles of Affiliates | Wilson Center,” The Wilson Center, 19 February 2016, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/isiss-growing-caliphate-profiles-affiliates.
73 For robustness check and to check for reverse causality in vector autoregressive models we further ran Granger Causality test. We receive null results. Due to the numeric nature of air strikes and religious holidays it was not possible to test reverse causality using the same regression model. However with this we do not conclude that there is no reverse causality, but rather a new analysis should be pursued in a future publication, examining the reverse relationship.
74 Mahlouly and Winter, “A Tale of Two Caliphates: Comparing the Islamic State’s Internal and External Messaging Priorities.”
75 “Imam’s Who Don’t Believe,” Al-Naba, 8 February 2017.
76 All the quotes in the manuscript were translated by the authors which include a native speaker and validated by a second author. Original Quote: “هم “إسلاميون” وقت الشدّة وإغلاق الأبواب وكمّ الأفواه، “ديموقراطيون” وقت الرخاء وفتح أبواب البرلمانات وصناديق الانتخابات وإطلاق ألسنتهم للكلام، فراعنةٌ مستبدّون وقت تمكّنهم في الأرض وتحكّمهم برقاب العبيد، لا يهمّهم إلا رضا الدول الصليبية وطوا” “Rather, It Is a Trial, but Most of Them Do Not Know,” Al-Naba, 26 September 2019, 9.
77 Some exemplary article, “The Battle of the Group and Factions,” Al-Naba, 12 December 2015; “The War of Embassies Is More Terror and Painful for the Infidel Countries,” Al-Naba, 2 August 2017.
78 Original quote “فرحمك الله يا أبا عبد الغفار وأسكنك الفردوس الأعلى من الجنة مع النبيين والصديقين والشهداء والصالحين وحسن أولئك رفيقا”. “Abu Abdul Ghaffar Maqdishawy,” Al-Naba, 25 July 2018, 9.
79 Original quote: “إقامة الدولة الإسلامية.. بين منهاج النبوة وسبل أهل الضلالة”; “The Twelver Rafidah,” Al-Naba, 16 March 2017.
80 Original quote: “القبول لا يقتصر على ولاية الرقة فقط، فهناك أعداد كبيرة من الطلبة ذكورا وإناثا من ولايات أخرى في الدولة، فثلث الطلبة مثلا هم من ولايات العراق، وأما الآخرون فهم من ولايات حلب ودمشق وحمص وغيرها، كما أن القبول لا يستثني أحدا من الطلبة، فكل طالب يقيم في أرض الدولة الإسلامية و…”; “Securing Medical Personnel Is the First Goal of the College of Medicine in Raqqa State.. the Nucleus of an Integrated University,” Al-Naba, 16 February 2016, 12.
81 “Infograph,” Al-Naba, 8 January 2016, 9.
82 Original quote: ” قضت محكمة الدولة الإسلامية بولاية الفرات بقتل الساحر الضرير )ط.ح.خ( 48 عاما”; “A Death of Blind Magician for Not Repenting,” Al-Naba, 16 November 2017.
83 “Mocking Religion,” Al-Naba, 21 June 2016.
84 “Infograph,” 9.
85 Original Quotes in their order in the sentence: “الطاغوت أردوغان”, “الطاغوت مرسي” and “بالطاغوت حازم صلاح أبو اسماعيل”; Original Quote: “المرتد عبد الحكيم بلحاج”; “Abu Ubaidah Al-Lubani: You Have Betrayed Al-Qaeda!,” Al-Naba, March 2, 2016.
86 “Conquests of Levant,” Al-Naba, 6 June 2018, 12.