The Terrorist Image

Published by: Hurst & Co., London, 2022, 320pp. ISBN: 9781787385672.

In the spring of 2013 after rebranding itself as “the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham” (ISIS/ISIL; now known as “Islamic State”), the militant organisation then headed by the late Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi expanded its media operations and propaganda campaign as its forces solidi ed their position in civil war- torn Syria and prepared to conquer large swaths of western and northern Iraq the following year. In late June 2014, ISIS spokesman Abu Muhammad al- [Adnani publicly announced the group’s pretensions to be the new “caliphate” following its conquest of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city. This was the start of the organisation’s golden age and also marked the high point of its media operations and propaganda output, which is the focus of the book under review by Charlie Winter, an expert on Islamic State and its media operations.

Throughout its organisational history, ISIS has expended a significant amount of resources and manpower on establishing and running a formidable media department and output as part of the ideological and messaging components of its insurgency. This pattern was put in place by the late founder of Islamic State’s precursor group, Jamaat al-Tawhid wa’l-Jihad (JTJ), Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and its later incarnations, Al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers/Iraq (AQI) the umbrella coalition calling itself the Mujahidin Shura Council (2005–2006) and later the Islamic State of Iraq (2006–2013). After the group’s declaration that it was a “caliphate,” its media production ramped up to become the most prodigious of any militant Islamist group in history. Islamic State utilised its media campaign as a key arm of its transnational insurgency and it is the centrality and semiotics of this media campaign that is the focus of The Terrorist Image.