Seeing the caliphate through the eye of a drone
Emil Archambault and Yannick Veilleux-Lepage
The seeming partial resurgence of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) throughout the first half of 2020 suggests that the territorial elimination of the caliphate and the killing of its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi did not put an end to the group’s political and ideological ambitions. While it is unclear whether this renewal of violent activity will be accompanied by the full range of intense propaganda efforts which characterized the first iteration of ISIS’s ‘caliphate’, it makes studying the visual rhetoric surrounding ISIS’ territorial ambitions a pressing concern.
Analysing how military activity and its visual depiction in propaganda contributed to ISIS’ representation of its claim to sovereignty is the focus of our recent article in International Affairs. We argue that ISIS employed images taken by modified commercial drones to stake a claim to vertical sovereignty and aerial domination of territory, drawing on long-standing visual and rhetorical tropes — to fly over is synonymous with control. While a handful of other terrorist groups have previously weaponized drones, this use of drones for purposes of visual propaganda is a genuine innovation of ISIS’ drone program.
The dataset of propaganda images taken by ISIS drones which we created for this research also allows us to show the care with which ISIS’ media operatives curate and select the images they publish. The images presented do not merely show drone action, but also show the purpose and intended message of the image. A good example of this is the series of photos of drones modified to drop munitions on enemy troops or vehicles. Often, in such photos, there are several visible craters right next to the target being hit.
The implications of such craters — evidence of previous unsuccessful strikes — are obvious. They indicate that ISIS drone marksmanship and bomb-dropping methods are not as precise as they like to pretend. It also suggests that ISIS has an interest in portraying itself as capable of engaging in highly precise attacks, selecting the images which show direct hits and discarding those which do not. This, in turn, shows that ISIS visual propaganda is carefully planned and curated for impact.
While this is not surprising in itself, it helps contextualize other images with a less immediately clear purpose. In our article, we concentrate on one such group of images: images taken by drones that show no combat, but merely drones overflying terrain. Starting from the assumption that such images serve a purpose, we argue that ISIS claiming effective sovereignty through aerial control. Examining why such images are selected and disseminated also allows us to relate ISIS’ drone propaganda to its wider visual propaganda efforts.
One of the more striking features of ISIS propaganda has been its tendency — along with gruesome videos depicting violence against its foes — to show everyday aspects of life under the ‘caliphate’. The enormous output of visual propaganda showing the normality of life in the early stages of the territorial incarnation of ISIS constituted a whole ‘virtual caliphate’ which legitimated its physical counterpart. Depictions of normal life, in all its banality and a functional administrative apparatus, represented a common feature of the group’s visual messaging — one which ISIS sought to spread far and wide. As a recently published article by Ayse Lokmanoglu argues, for actors such as ISIS, ‘symbolic markers of such governance activities serve as their modus operandi in validating their sovereignty to the international world, even when they lack territorial control or effective governance’. Drone images serve the same purpose: they represent symbolic markers of ISIS’ control of territory. The images of drones we examined were taken at a time when ISIS’ grasp on the territory of its caliphate was gradually but violently slipping away. The diffusion of drone images, therefore, allowed ISIS to show it still held control, flying over territory it claimed to possess.
The use of drones for propaganda perpetuated the ‘broader caliphate story’ but made allowances for the new situation in which the group’s territorial control was at stake. This use of airborne means for power projection is not new, and studying it in the context of ISIS’ visual propaganda allows us to understand the wider strategic value of such images. ISIS now finds itself in a new situation: seeking to reverse its ‘de-territorialisation’ after a series of stinging defeats. The strategic impact of its online visual propaganda and its representation of sovereign ‘statehood’ should remain a focus of scholarship and counter-ISIS efforts.
Emil Archambault is a doctoral candidate at the School of Government and International Affairs at the University of Durham. His doctoral research seeks to situate the use of military drones in the wider history development of aerial warfare, tracing continuities and discontinuities in practices and doctrines of air warfare. His doctoral research is funded by a Durham Doctoral Studentship and the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council.
Yannick Veilleux-LePage is Assistant Professor in the Institute of Security and Global Affairs at Leiden University. He previously worked as a Senior Researcher in the Transcultural Conflict and Violence Initiative at Georgia State University, where he worked on Department of Defense funded projects analysing media products and online discourse produced by extremist groups.
Their article ‘Drone Imagery in Islamic State Propaganda: Flying like a State’ is published open-access in the July 2020 issue of International Affairs.
Read the article here.
