Content creators on YouTube, including those from India, have started to reach Afghanistan, a year after a maladroit US withdrawal and overnight destruction of the government of Ashraf Ghani allotted the keys of Kabul back to the Taliban.
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| Source: Twitter |
The videos clicked by You tubers are watched by millions, displaying the Taliban in an opaque light, now controlling over 40 million people once again since their first regime in the 1990s. In this epoch of social media and hyper-information, it is extensively easy and cheap for non-state militant groups to make themselves known in living rooms across the whole globe and carry on this democratization of information for their plans. And they have had great achievements so far.
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Media has always been a critical part of the publicity for militant groups. From the 1990s, visuals of the western press questioning Osama bin Laden in the background of caves in rural Afghanistan are re-played even today. That was the age of cord news, a sure-shot way of receiving your message across not just in the West, but the entire world. The Taliban, much like others, utilized a mixture of policies to get their beliefs across, from ‘night letters’ or shabnamah, which were on-paper diktats physically delivered to individuals or villages in the dead of night, to operating its website Alemara in the 2000s and ultimately taking on social media in the 2010s.
Opinion of the Taliban is entering your living rooms, and YouTubers are helping after maximizing its reach on Twitter, the Taliban now has YouTubers to propel its narrative. Even Indian creators have launched to land at Kabul airport.
Twitter and Taliban
In October this year, the Taliban ran a hashtag publicity on Twitter called #UnitedAfghanistan. At one point, Twitter showed that over 1,25,000 tweets on the outlet were using the hashtag with several pro-Taliban social media accounts also contributing to ensure that the message finds its limbs online. The hashtag in all likelihood was amplified further by using bots. The notion behind this movement by the Taliban was to expand the message, greatly to the global audience, that the Pashtun-led Taliban now in sovereignty sought a ‘united’ Afghanistan, made up of all nationalities. It showed Taliban leaders with other racial leaders in the country. And to dissipate the rumours of the interior struggle between the prevailing power blocks of the Kandaharis and the Haqqanis, it exhibited photos of Mullah Yaqoob, Taliban founder Mullah Omar’s son and working defence minister along with Sirajuddin Haqqani, of the famous Haqqani Network who is furthermore the working interior minister. Twitter has prevailed as a blessing for the Taliban, which as of today, has a very well-devised, understood, and developed media strategy. The Taliban knows what kind of speech the West wants to hear, and moves toward its interchanges with foreign media with that in mind.
The rise of the so-called Islamic State (ISIS, or Daesh in Arabic) in Syria and Iraq between 2014 and 2017, in a way, revolutionized how non-state entertainers use social media and the internet for well-imagined and enforced publicity. That publicity can also be used to manipulate newspaper and television news programmes despite their editorial examination.
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The ISIS ecosystem, fueled by young and tech-savvy volunteers, particularly from Europe, formulated athletic data creation and diffusion ecosystems that prevail and are duplicated even today. Many pro-ISIS prosecutions in India during this period were also radicalized by the online equipment and advertising released by ISIS and its associates. These included well-produced and high-definition videos shot in Hollywood-style action movies, online magazines with infographics and data visualization, and even podcasts. A lot of these journals, at the top of the Islamist group’s regime over provinces, that at the time were as huge in geography as the United Kingdom, continue to be released despite the territorial doom of the caliphate. Today, the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) has its publicity openings targeting India, Pakistan, the Taliban in Afghanistan, Maldives, and South Asia in general. It is essential to note here that two of the most destructive attacks associated to the Islamic State took place in South Asia in Bangladesh in 2016 and Sri Lanka in 2019.