La strategia comunicativa del sedicente Stato Islamico tra mondo arabo ed ecumene islamica

[Autom. eng. transl.] Net of the difficulties experienced in recent years and of the defeats suffered on the Syro-Iraqi and Libyan theater, the self-styled Islamic State (IS) proclaimed by the guerrillas of the 'caliph' Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi represents a unicum within the jihadist galaxy. Since the conquest of Mosul in June 2014, in fact, the offensive unleashed by the jihadist cohorts has led the movement to extend its authority over an area that went from northern Syria to eastern Iraq and to proclaim the birth of a series of provinces (wilaya) distributed along an arc of instability that from the Maghreb continued until the Sahelian region and then wound through Levante, Mesopotamia, Persian Gulf, Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent. An unprecedented success based on a series of victories that caught the entire international community by surprise, but also on a communication strategy capable of generating a level of support never recorded in the history of contemporary jihadism. This last factor represents one of the most characteristic elements of IS. Already in the past other leading exponents of the jihadist galaxy had stressed the importance of the struggle on the ideological and propagandistic level (the same Ayman al-Zawahiri, current leader of al-Qa'ida, wrote in a letter of 2005 as more than half of the battle in progress was fought on the media level), but no one has ever come close to the levels reached by the 'Islamic State' (IS), which placed the campaign for the "hearts and minds" of the umma and the strategy of terror at the center of their own action. The present paper intends to examine the most relevant points of the IS message, as well as the peculiarity of its media platform, without ignoring the decisive weight exercised by the environmental conditions that have allowed the "caliphate" to emerge - these elements are strongly interconnected. The first part of the chapter will therefore focus on the root causes behind the rise of the phenomenon in question, focusing in particular on the decisive weight played by the various crises that, starting in the early 2000s, affected the entire quadrant middle Eastern. The following paragraphs will instead be devoted to outlining the strengths of the IS doctrinal approach and its differences with respect to the formations that preceded it. The last part of the essay, on the other hand, will briefly present the different instruments to which the group has resorted to convey its message and the elements that have contributed decisively to mark its success.