Fire, Film, Tweet: The Taliban’s New Way of War
Fire, Film, Tweet: The Taliban’s New Way of War by Mujib Mashal, New York Times
Taliban fighters posed for the camera, their shawls and bandannas covering their identities but not their jubilation, as they captured the main roundabout in the northern Afghan city of Kunduz early this month in what could have been called “operation hoist the flag and pull out a smartphone.”
The shaky cellphone video directly contradicted Afghan and American military spokesmen, who were promising that Kunduz was safe from falling for a second time within a year. During the invasion, insurgents live-tweeted their victory and flooded social media with videos, often shot by fighters narrating their movements in close to real time. In the video from the roundabout, one of the many fighters in the background is heard saying into a phone: “I will call you back. The flag is going up. I have to film it.”
It was not an isolated incident. When the Afghan government said the insurgents were far from the southern provincial capital of Lashkar Gah, the Taliban quickly put out a video showing a fighter driving around the city’s outskirts in a seized government Humvee, steering wheel in one hand and microphone in the other.
The video, shown below, is aimed at displaying the ease with which Taliban fighters are moving near the city. But it is also rubbing salt on the wound: The Taliban are making constant use of the American equipment they have captured from the Afghan forces, including the Humvee the fighter is driving.
Increasingly, the Taliban — who, when they controlled the government, banned television and jailed people for photography — rely on their front-line fighters not only to gain territory and strike at the Afghan security forces, but also to record the moment and share it.
It appears that they are drawing inspiration from the Islamic State’s propaganda-first strategy. In the past, the Taliban released elaborate videos of suicide bombings long after the fact, their material falling far short of the Islamic State’s slick production values. Recently, though, they have been aiming for close-to-real-time updates and have greatly improved on quality. A few days ago, the insurgents released footage filmed by drone-mounted cameras of a suicide car bomb targeting the Nawa district center in Helmand Province.
In a country where social media use is becoming more and more vital, the Taliban are making sure to flood the information channels with their message. And with the government already on the defensive both on the battlefield and in the fight over perceptions, the insurgents are also going out of their way to deny the government access to those channels.
In places like Helmand Province, as soon as the fighting intensifies, the Taliban force the cellphone network providers to shut down their signal towers. Government officials struggle to get their message out, with local officials and press officers often out of reach.
“We don’t touch their towers, but we tell them to stop the signals of certain towers close to the battlefield,” the Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said. He said they had appointed media officers in the front lines because “we want to fill the vacuum ourselves.”
Physically, too, they have limited the reach and movement of the Afghan government over the past year. The insurgents have often cut off the main highways, and sometimes struck government convoys on them, starting firefights with Afghan forces like the one this video shows near the main highway in Baghlan Province. By sharing videos of such acts, the Taliban clearly want to project the vulnerability of the Afghan forces’s supply chain…
