ISIS’s Call of Duty

BY JAY CASPIAN KANG

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In a recruitment video for the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS (also known as ISIL or I.S.), that has been making the rounds of some uglier parts of the Internet, a man sits in a plastic chair on a porch, a rifle stuck between his knees. The camera, at this point, is only a voyeur; the man in the chair seems bored, unremarkable. A bullet hits the cement wall behind his head, kicking up a puff of dust. He gets to his feet and stumbles forward, confused and disoriented. The view changes: an overlay effect makes it look as if the man is being watched through a sniper’s scope. A red dot zeroes in on the man’s midsection. There is a gunshot; the man recoils. As he grimaces in pain, the footage grinds down to render, in slow motion, every expression of his face, his flailing arms.

Later, the camera is in a car driving down a highway. We see the barrel of the assault rifle pointed out the window. A passing car is shot up—the windows shatter, and, although it would normally be hard to make out the injured driver in all the chaos, the footage slows down to confirm the kill.

The mechanics of all this should be familiar to anyone who has played a first-person-shooter video game, or F.P.S., in the past ten years. In Halo, Call of Duty, Gears of War, and pretty much every other F.P.S. sold today, when your first shot misses, the scope button will help you to hone in on your target. The edges of the screen blur to black, the red dot jumps to simulate the shooter’s heartbeat, and, when you hit the trigger button, the reaction—the gush of blood, the facial contortions, and the man’s slow exit from view—is registered, frame by frame. The sequence is so familiar that, while watching the ISIS video, I, who only play such games on occasion, could feel the rhythm of the controller’s commands. Right trigger (missed shot), hold down left trigger to bring up scope, orient the crosshairs, right trigger again, watch your handiwork as it falls out of the frame.

The similarities between ISIS recruitment films and first-person-shooter games are likely intentional. Back in June, an ISIS fighter told the BBC that his new life was “better than that game Call of Duty.” Video-game-themed memes traced back to ISIS have been floating around the Internet for months, including one that reads, “THIS IS OUR CALL OF DUTY AND WE RESPAWN IN JANNAH.” (“Respawn” is the gamer word for reincarnate.) Another ISIS video,as the Intercept notes, looks like a deliberate homage to Grand Theft Auto. Audio clips that sound much like ones in Call of Duty have been spliced into other ISIS videos. Many of the ISIS recruitment videos are dedicated to showcasing rocket launchers, mines, and assault rifles, as if to say, “If you join us, you’ll get to shoot these things.”

The use of video games as a recruiting tool is not new. The United States Army has, for the past decade, offered “America’s Army,” an online multiplayer shooter; it is among the most downloaded war games of all time and has been credited with helping boost enlistment. In 2009, according to the New YorkTimes, Army recruiters hoping to attract enlistees from urban areas set up stations in a Philadelphia mall where kids could play video games and, if they so chose, talk to someone about what life in the armed forces would be like.

There’s no need to take the comparison any further. “America’s Army” is supposed to be an instructive game, and does not glorify violence for its own sake; nor does it allow the player to shoot random passersby, stand over their bodies, and unload magazines of ammunition into their backs. The Army, while gaining traction through the promise of turning simulated combat into real combat, softened the edge with images of soldiers liberating people in war-torn countries. ISIS has refined the mechanics of the sale of violence. Aside from the recruitment films tailored to evoke video games, they also have released a series called Mujatweets, which stresses the brotherhood of ISIS fighters and shows them handing out candy to children.

In their recruitment of Western jihadis, ISIS has used a broad, pop-culture-laden campaign that seems to be aimed at turning what once might have been a radical religious message into something more worldly. During the World Cup, an ISIS Twitter account posted an image of a decapitated head with the message “This is our football, it’s made of skin #WorldCup.” That ISIS would try to access Western kids through such avenues speaks to a deep cynicism that discards the religious and the political for adrenaline and gore.

Before Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary left his home in London to go fight for ISIS, he was a promising m.c. known as L. Jinny. Bary’s father was arrested in 1999 for his connections to the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, and was extradited to the United States, leaving his family behind in London. There was speculation earlier this month that Bary fils might be the masked British man in the ISIS beheading videos. An early video of him rapping to a Fugees beat is currently circulating the Internet, with almost a quarter-million views on YouTube:

What you know about six siblings and a mum to feed
[unclear] cut the benefits, now I’m the one for P’s
And now they want to send my family back to Egypt
Already feeling seasick, got to get them P’s quick
Now would you pay attention if I had some more views
Bitches in the videos, chilling in the Porsche Coupe
The realest in the game, fuck a glistening chain
Most of us grew up in poverty, difficult to relate

For many young people, it’s probably not too difficult to relate. And while ISISshould have little trouble recruiting the Eric Harrises of the world, who, as Dexter Filkins pointed out in an earlier post, join the ranks because “killing is the real point of being there,” it’s worth wondering how much further their reach could extend. How many frustrated kids whose only outlets for aggression are Call of Duty, sports, or hip-hop will take a disastrous step in illogic and see ISIS as the real-life evocation of those fantasies?