Is the weaponisation of history by ISIS distinctive?

Synopsis

“In war, narrative is much more than just a story.

 ‘Narrative’ may sound like a fancy literary word, but it is actually the foundation of all strategy, upon which all else – policy, rhetoric and action – is built.”

This essay explores the distinctive n

onisation involves, in this case, crafting a revisionist Salafist narrative that glorifies an idealised Islamic past, frames ISIS as the rightful heir to this historic legacy, and justifies its violent actions as part of a cyclical struggle against external threats. This narrative is disseminated through sophisticated propaganda, such as Dabiq Magazine, leveraging Orientalist tropes, and informed by the writing of Sayyid Qutb, to invert and challenge Western narratives, portraying ISIS as both a restorer of Islamic glory and an avenger of a colonial oppression dating back to the Crusades. In contrast, destructive weaponisation entails the systematic obliteration of cultural heritage, archaeological sites, and historical artefacts that contradict ISIS’s narrative, most famously in the destruction of Palmyra and the Mosul Museum. By erasing competing histories, ISIS created an epistemic vacuum in which it could impose its version of the past. Ultimately, the combination of these tactics – constructing a mythologised history while annihilating all alternatives – has rendered ISIS’s weaponisation of history a uniquely destructive example of the phenomenon.

Essay

The weaponisation of history by ISIS is arguably a distinctive case; one in which history is produced but also destroyed on an exceptional scale. This essay will argue that ISIS has used this method to achieve its aims, without success – evident in the fact it only “remains capable of conducting insurgent operations” and, since March 2019, no longer rules a territory. The aims of ISIS required them to harness what will herein be defined as ‘productive weaponisation’ and ‘destructive weaponisation’, a dualistic process of weaponisation that, in combination, arguably makes ISIS’s weaponisation of history uniquely destructive. The aims of ISIS include –

1. the establishment of an Islamic caliphate that is ruled by sharia law

2. a burgeoning desire to return to the Islam of the salaf, thus emulating “Islam’s pious ancestors”

3. the construction of metanarratives that align with 1 and 2 to justify all terrorist acts 

With its third aim, ISIS’s approach to history became one of ‘cyclical cognitive reinforcement’ (see Appendix A), a method that is intrinsic to its use of productive weaponisation and destructive weaponisation in the period 2013 to 2019 – constructing ISIS’s narrative as a binary in which it is the ‘in-group’, and all external threats (and thus challenges to ISIS’s 1st and 2nd aims) become the oppressive ‘out-group’ – the ‘Other’.

Built upon the founding pillars of Salafism, ISIS possesses an inherent distaste for history outside of the Salafist narrative, believing that “Islam has been tainted by centuries of human revision and interpretation”, particularly of the ideals and practices of the salaf. In action, this translates to ISIS targeting any “sense of shared history” between itself and all other cultures by both producing material that isolates ISIS from modern society, and destructively targeting cultural heritage as it heralds itself the “sect saved from hellfire”. What distinguishes ISIS’s weaponisation of history is not merely its production of a revisionist narrative, but its systematic obliteration of all competing historical discourse. Undoubtedly, other political or militant organisations construct alternative histories to coexist – however contentiously – with established narratives, as well as destroy remnants of the past. However, at its height ISIS enacted a form of destructive weaponisation that was arguably distinctive in its unprecedented degree and effectiveness. ISIS’s approach is not reducible to censorship or ideological bias; rather, it constituted what may be described as a “scorched-earth policy” against historical plurality. By deliberately targeting cultural heritage sites, manuscripts, archaeological artefacts, monuments, and the people charged with their care – such as in the ancient city of Palmyra, the libraries of Mosul, and the Assyrian ruins of Nimrud – ISIS engaged in an absolute, uncompromising campaign to purge the material and symbolic remains of historical narratives that did not serve its theological and political objectives. In doing so, it cleared the epistemic space necessary to install its version of history, a version grounded in eschatological myth and propaganda. The ‘ISIS distinction’ lies not only in what history it produced, but in how ardently it sought to destroy all other histories – a violent erasure that doesn’t challenge alternative accounts, but obliterates them.

Productive Weaponisation

Using Edgar Wolfrum’s work on “history as a weapon”, productive weaponisation can be defined as the shaping of narratives to use as a weapon that can effect change as well as pursue and achieve political aims, and is recognisable among other terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda, as well as certain states – Russia, North Korea, and increasingly the United States. Aligning with Wolfrum’s approach, historian Timothy Snyder’s view of the role of history in his “politics of eternity”, as opposed to “politics of inevitability”, is useful for understanding ISIS’s productive weaponisation. Politicians of eternity – in this case, leading figures of ISIS – must fabricate a national Salafist narrative of “crisis and manipulate the resultant emotion” in order to justify retaliatory actions against their opponents. ISIS’s productive weaponisation is a “cyclical story of victimhood”, in which every past, present and future event is just “one more instance of a timeless threat” to what the organisation stands for – an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ binary: true believers (the ‘in-group’) and the enemies of Islam (the ‘out-group’). By positioning ISIS as a reformative force, their actions are legitimised as the continuation of a divine historical mission in which violent jihadism becomes the sole means of restoring an idealised past.

ISIS’s productive weaponisation appears in its campaign to garner support for its aim of establishing an Islamic caliphate, producing a history grounded in stories of continuous oppression, and constructed as a ‘civilisational war’ against the Occident. ISIS arguably justifies violent actions by suspending its adherents in a temporality detached from progress or accountability, and placing them in a grievance-driven narrative reminiscent of the “politics of eternity”; the history of a persistently oppressive West is constantly resurrected to explain and justify present suffering. In this context, productive weaponisation is a tool, with technology (its Al-Hayat media outlet – particularly Dabiq Magazine) a way for ISIS to communicate to Muslims “who they are, where they come from and where they should be going”. To analyse the impact of ISIS’s productive weaponisation of its Salafist narrative, it is necessary to understand the “father of Salafi jihadism” – Sayyid Qutb – and his idea of al-salibiyya. Qutb’s rhetoric is manifest in the jihadism of ISIS, with his view of “the Crusader spirit that runs in the blood of all Occidentals” evident in ISIS’s productive weaponisation – through their persistent references to the fact that Muslims have historically been, as claimed in the February 2015 issue of Dabiq, “enslaved by the West”. For example, ISIS spokesperson Abu Muhammad al-Adnani’s 2015 statement urged Muslims around the world to engage in a “holy war” against Russia and the United States, who, he claimed, were leading a “crusaders’ war against the Muslims”. ISIS’s narrative also resonates with Edward Said’s view of Islam being “handled” in a continuous European narrative that depicts Islam as a “fraudulent new version of…Christianity”, and Muslim humiliation during the Crusades is productively weaponised “for mobilising Muslim consciousness”. Issue 15 of Dabiq described the West as “the Crusader coalition” that has committed “crimes against the Muslims” as they “wage war against anyone who calls to the truth” – inciting revenge and cultivating a sense of historical injustice that must be rectified. Ironically, the West aided this weaponisation of history with, for example, President George W. Bush’s 2001 comment that “this crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while” (the White House later clarified that he regretted any offence caused by the term ‘crusade’).

However, what is distinctive about ISIS’s productive weaponisation is the sheer degree and effectiveness with which it harnessed technology to activate a psychological response in which emotions override and become a substitute for knowledge, provoking no attachment to specific historical ‘facts’ but rather an attachment only to the emotions. ISIS’s digital communications strategy has not merely been informative but performatively choreographed – it seeks to “reduce life to spectacle and feeling” by, at its height in 2015, producing “on average 38 individual batches of propaganda each day” – including videos, photo essays, and statements. Appendix B provides an example in which ISIS perverts what E. H. Carr once described as the “unending dialogue between the present and the past” to fabricate continuity between the imperial era and their caliphate. By weaponising the very visual lexicon that the imperialists used to frame the Islamic world as violent and despotic, ISIS’s appropriation of French Orientalism paradoxically perverts, and yet affirms the conception of itself as the Qutbian offensive jihadi. Arguably, the works demonstrate ISIS’s deliberate effort to draw continuity between barbarous executions by the Orient in the colonial era and the staged executions of Western hostages by ISIS, wherein the spectacle of beheading, once used to depict Muslim barbarity, is reclaimed by ISIS as a symbol of retributive justice. Regnault’s work, representing 19th century French colonialism (particularly in Algeria), reinforced an exotic vision of Islamic cruelty through the executioner – a vision in which violence is arbitrary, performative, and deeply embedded in cultural practice. As Said noted, the West’s self-perception was that they were “facing barbarian hordes [Islam]”; as such, the image of the violent Muslim executioner becomes the bearer of the West’s fantasies of Muslim barbarism. ISIS’s vision of the famous image deliberately appropriated this historical construction of Islamic violence but inverted its function. The militant, clad in black and wielding a knife, assumes the role of the executioner in Regnault’s painting, not as a European ‘projection’ but as a self-possessed agent of vengeance and sovereignty as Qutb’s ‘vanguard’. He asserts agency over the narrative, portraying direct confrontation between the Qutbian jihadi and Western imperialism – what Qutb described as but a “mask for the crusading spirit”. Further, ISIS’s appropriation appears as a calculated act of historical vengeance: while Regnault’s Moor is pictured in orange robes, ISIS’s victim is now clothed in orange. Here, the use of the bright orange jumpsuit also serves to draw powerful visual parallels with the “abuse of Muslim prisoners in places such as Guantanamo Bay, and Abu Ghraib”. ISIS’s productive weaponisation does not simply reproduce Western fantasies of Islamic violence, it repurposes them to hold the West accountable for its own history of extrajudicial killings, torture, and military occupation.

Destructive Weaponisation

Scholarship has established that the aim of ISIS has been to “emulate Islam’s pious ancestors”; this aim drives its productive weaponisation, however, what arguably makes it truly distinctive from other instances of the ‘weaponisation of history’ is the degree and effectiveness of its destructive weaponisation. Destructive weaponisation refers to the systematic destruction of cultural heritage, a form of violence against people, physical sites and “practices, representations, expressions, knowledge and skills”, designed to “annihilate the local sense of belonging and collective sense of memory among local communities”. In this case, ISIS clearly aimed to annihilate all traces of a history that lies outside of the acceptable (Salafist) narrative. Moreover, physical acts of destruction are strategically choreographed to invoke “connections to an imagined past” that reinstate the idyllic “actions of their forebearers” – such as the legacy of the iconoclasm of the Prophet Abraham, and the Prophet Muhammed and his followers during the first generations of Islam.  

The United Nations has estimated that “over 21 per cent [of archaeological sites in ISIS controlled territories] have been affected by looting”. In addition, ISIS’s destruction of heritage, far from “senseless acts perpetrated by barbarous savages”, has always been deliberate, with a distinct purpose behind each act. Destructive weaponisation is central to the guiding aim of ISIS – a “scorched-earth policy” that serves to literally remove rival histories in its territories, creating a vacuum that allows free space for its productive weaponisation. Defined as a “war crime” by UNESCO Director General Irina Bokova, ISIS’s destruction of cultural heritage at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Palmyra, Syria, is arguably the most famous example of its destructive weaponisation of history. In the effort to reestablish the Islamic caliphate, ISIS had “zero tolerance for the region’s rich history and myriad worldviews”. Palmyra, with its physical remainders of an “interethnic and multicultural exchange between the Greek and Roman, Hellenistic and Byzantine, and East and West”, stood in obvious contrast to ISIS’s aims. In a “blow against cultural heritage” that deprived the “Syrian people of its past and its future”, ISIS intentionally destroyed 2000-year-old structures – the Arch of Victory, the Baalshamin temple, the Temple of Bel, the Roman tetrapylon and theatre – and smashed all polytheistic statues, destroying a site long central to “Syrian historic consciousness”. Arguably, what distinguishes ISIS’s weaponisation of history from others (like that of Russia, for instance, where there is an attempt to mask the vandalism) is ISIS’s brutally public display of destructive weaponisation. For example, in 2015, the smashing of a shirk [idolatrous] statue performed in a public square in Palmyra to an audience, “who are told of the statue’s inherent blasphemy”. Most profoundly, what became truly distinctive in ISIS’s destructive weaponisation was the simultaneous destruction of people, including those seen as the ‘keepers’ of history. In Palmyra, ISIS used the Roman amphitheatre for mass public executions. They also tortured and murdered the Syrian archaeologist, Khaled Al-Asaad, the Director of Antiquities at Palmyra, for refusing to divulge the location of hundreds of hidden artefacts he helped guard before ISIS’s occupation of the ancient city.  ISIS publicly hanged his body in Palmyra, with a sign labelling him as the “director of idolatry”, and then disseminated images of his decapitated body on its social media networks. ISIS’s destructive weaponisation went beyond censorship, beyond the destruction of sites and objects that could communicate an alternative past; it targeted the very people who held the same historical power.

The “cultural cleansing” of destructive weaponisation is also a form of “performative destruction”. Central to ISIS’s performative destruction was its videography, which broadcasted its radical ideology to recruit transnational militants through highly choreographed performances, while also defying the value attached to cultural heritage by the UN. In Al-Hayat’s video output, emphasis was placed on the beheading of statues – obviously mirroring the way ISIS carried out the execution of prisoners – embedding acts of statue destruction within a broader political message aimed at the international community. The decapitation of statues at the Mosul Museum deliberately replicated the brutal film of ISIS child soldiers executing prisoners at an ISIS training school, as well as the beheading of foreign journalists such as James Foley and Steven Sotloff. Weaponising the decapitation of statues thus became part of the method by which the destruction of history was inclusive of the violent destruction of people. Moreover, through its media output, ISIS communicated its destructive weaponisation as the purging of what ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi described as the “idol of nationalism” – describing the state produced iconography of modern Syria and Iraq that included posters of prominent individuals such as Haider Jawad Kadhim al-Abadi – the Prime Minister of Iraq (2014-2018). To support its Islamic caliphate, ISIS cleared the land of any remnants of the Syrian and Iraqi histories of state-bound modern nationalism. To this end, Dabiq Magazine presented ISIS militants tearing down Iraqi flags and destroying images of prominent political figures, while their rhetoric brought past and present together in rallying against their targets: “the banners of nationalism are beneath his dusty feet, as they oppose tawhid [monotheism] and the shariah [Islamic law] and represent the kufr [non-believer] and shirk [idolatry] ideologies brought to the Muslim world by the two crusaders: Sykes and Picot”. The reference to Sykes and Picot resonated with Qutb’s Crusaderism, as ISIS promoted “itself as the first jihadist organisation to explicitly defy the Sykes-Picot Agreement”.

Remembering and forgetting are inextricably linked

The weaponisation of history by ISIS arguably represents the discrete forms of productive and destructive weaponisation at their most brutal. By employing productive weaponisation, ISIS has crafted a mythologised past that glorifies Salafist ideals, frames its violence as divinely sanctioned, and fosters a cyclical narrative of victimhood and redemption. Simultaneously, its destructive weaponisation – the systematic erasure of cultural heritage – has ruthlessly eliminated competing histories, ensuring ideological dominance through epistemic violence. This dual strategy not only reinforced ISIS’s authority among followers but also irreparably severed communities from their collective memory, destabilising identities and legitimising ISIS’s claims to territorial and theological supremacy. While ISIS’s territorial caliphate has collapsed, because of the degree and function of its weaponisation, its legacy endures. ISIS’s case serves as a stark warning: the battle over history is not merely academic – it can be a brutal and literal battleground for power.

Appendix

Appendix A

Source: Ingram, Haroro. 2016. “An Analysis of Islamic State's Dabiq Magazine.” Australian Journal of Political Science 51 (3). p. 464

Cyclical Cognitive Reinforcement

Appendix B

Source: Ahmad, Jared. 2024. “‘Islam Is the Religion of the Sword Not Pacifism’: Strategic Nostalgia and Self-Othering in Islamic State Propaganda.” In Enemy Encounters in Modern Warfare, Furneaux, Holly, and Matilda Greig, eds. Palgrave Macmillan. Cham. p. 309

Henri Regnault’s Execution without Judgement under the Moorish Kings (1870), Islamic State Al-Hayat Media (2014)

Appendix C

Source: Wolfrum, Edgar. 2001. Geschichte Als Waffe: Vom Kaiserreich Bis Zur Wiedervereinigung. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Göttingen. https://digi20.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/fs1/object/display/bsb00047563_00001.html. p. 5-6

Author’s Translation of p. 5-6 of “Introduction”

Who Henry I was is by no means certain. The sources fail the historian here. The Saxon duke is said to have been crowned king by the Saxons and Franks in 919. At the beginning of the 19th century, a Henry I myth arose in Germany; fabulous and bizarre legends were woven around this figure. The early German national movement sought heroes of national history, and the less historical knowledge was available, the more the imagination came into play. Thus, German national history suddenly began with Henry I in the early Middle Ages. Soon after, he was considered the founder of the German Empire and was praised for apparently conquering and colonizing lands in the East. From this, the "German drive to the East" was derived, the origins of which many contemporary writers and historians located in Henry's era. In the first third of the 20th century, Heinrich Himmler, SS leader in the "Third Reich," finally discovered the medieval king, who had been accused of so much, for the National Socialist movement and for the planned war of annihilation in the East. Henry I was chosen as the Reich's ancestor and made into a symbolic figure for German eastward expansion, with which the nation was supposedly to attempt, as it had supposedly done a thousand years earlier, to destroy the Slavic population in Eastern Europe and create "living space" for the Germans.

This example shows that historical scholarship does not have a monopoly on history and memory. History has been and continues to be used as a weapon, as a political tool against internal and external opponents. In recent years, research has increasingly focused on this topic. History—or the construction of the past—is evidently a suitable mobilization resource in the political struggle for influence and power. It can serve as a binding agent to integrate national, social, or other groups.

It can exclude, defame opponents, and simultaneously legitimize one's own actions. If one wants to examine these mechanisms more closely, it is advisable to examine diverse forms of historical presentation, ranging from the production of myths and national heroes to the creation of meaning through museums and monuments. Schoolbooks and novels, radio and television programs, also contribute to the popularization of certain perspectives on the past. They create landscapes of memory—and landscapes of memory influence people's ideas and values.

Such a history policy is not only practiced in authoritarian regimes or dictatorships. Even in democratic societies based on competition and pluralism, one quickly recognizes a permanent, interest-driven struggle for the power to name. Whoever can assert this power, whoever succeeds in updating a particular memory and thereby pushing aside others or allowing them to be forgotten, is apparently able to provide orientation and control the perception of reality. It is reasonable to assume that in this way, not only are events and situations defined and emotions addressed, but the willingness to act is often also created. Historians play a leading role in this "work on national memory." But the circle of those who have access to history extends far beyond it – in different ways at different times – and includes intellectuals, journalists, and above all politicians. Professional historical scholarship generates historical knowledge, and historians, if they take their profession seriously, are committed to faithful reconstruction and the critique of tradition. However, the relationship between scholarship and political power is multifaceted and complicated, as the current debate about the behaviour of German historians during National Socialism illustrates. In principle, the proximity of scholarship to politics says nothing about its quality. However, it is equally undeniable that history can also have a profound public impact beyond historical truth and enlightenment.

Remembering and forgetting are inextricably linked; forgetting can even be understood as an effect of remembering: the selection mechanism of remembering leads to something being remembered at the expense of something else.

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