Al Qaeda takes huge losses in media battle space

Strategy Page:

Over the last few months, al Qaedas Internet propaganda department has been virtually destroyed. The most visible evidence of that is the sharp decline in al Qaeda press releases (often accompanied by vids of attacks on U.S. or Iraqi troops). Last year, there were as many as 200 of these items a month. Over the past few months, this fell over 90 percent.

The reason for this sharp drop was the physical capture of the al Qaeda news and production staff, along with their PCs and data files. Over the last few months, several dozen of these specialists were captured or killed, and nearly a terabyte (a thousand gigabytes) of raw video, sound files, documents and software was captured. This put many key terrorist PR operations out of business. This in turn led to fewer cash donations, or volunteers for combat, or suicide missions. Moreover, the sudden collapse of the al Qaeda PR operation caused the Arab media to move towards more coverage of the Iraqi government (which was now distributing more of its own very professional combat videos). The Arab media had also noticed the sharp loss of public support al Qaeda had suffered in the Arab world. All those Moslem civilians al Qaeda killed in their suicide bombing attacks was rather more than even the most anti-Western Arabs could stomach.

...

Since al Qaeda has said that half its war effort is in the media battle space this is a significant loss for them. Their propaganda arm acted as a force multiplier for al Qaeda exaggerating their impact and they were aided by a US media that was too willing to follow their script on many occasions.Their downfall happened at a time when more and more Muslims were rejecting the mass murder for Allah campaign.