The U.S. military’s program dedicated to countering the Islamic State’s propaganda has fewer than a dozen staffers, the Pentagon said in a statement Wednesday.
While the U.S. has over 4,000 troops fighting ISIS in Iraq and Syria, only eleven Central Command officials are devoted to countering the terrorist group’s propaganda offensive in cyber space.
Centcom’s Digital Engagement Team, or DET, is tasked with combating extremist messaging across the Middle East by infiltrating regional Internet forums with an opposing narrative. Members of the team are fluent in Arabic, Farsi, and Urdu, among other languages. DET is also responsible for representing Centcom in these languages by tailoring its messaging to news cycles in the broader surrounding region.
Defense officials said the reach of ISIS online has been diminished since the group swept into Iraq in 2014, citing fewer YouTube videos from the jihadist group of victory parades, lines of vehicles, and black flags. Officials also noted that while Twitter remains the center of ISIS’ information campaign, the group’s presence on social media has decreased by reporting and taking down several accounts.
"The way that they will maintain their audience is either through a hashtag in the description of the account, or the account image will be something like a little brand that people will be able to recognize, and the account will be numbered in such a way that people can sort of figure out–because it will be sequential in numbers or letters or some way," one Centcom official said. "So people can then very quickly get back to that source."
Centcom also has a web operations program, known as Web Ops, that involves around 120 people who coordinate with the State Department and other countries participating in the fight against ISIS to "ensure themes and messages are consistent," according to the Pentagon statement.
One official said that Web Ops employs a three-pronged strategy: "‘disrupting’ adversary propaganda, exposing adversaries’ hypocrisies and crimes through engagements with at-risk target audiences, and mobilizing the adversaries’ opponents to more effectively combat the adversary online."
ISIS’ Internet presence continues to inspire lone wolf extremists, including the attacks in San Bernardino, Calif. and Orlando, Fla., to carry out assaults in the name of the jihadist group.