By EHSANULLAH AMIRI in Kabul and MARGHERITA STANCATI in DUBAI
Days after a U.S. airstrike in May killed Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour, a group of Taliban fighters gathered at a mosque in western Afghanistan to pledge allegiance to their new commander, Maulavi Haibatullah Akhondzada. Then they posted a video of the ceremony on Facebook.
Before the Taliban were toppled from power in the U.S.-led invasion of 2001, the hard-line Islamist group banned television, cinemas and photography as un-Islamic. When they came together again as an insurgency to fight the Afghan government and its foreign backers, they communicated in terse battlefield updates shared through their website and later on Twitter. They also sent the occasional wordy missive to journalists.
Now, the Taliban are active on a variety of media platforms. They recently began releasing audio files with songs and news updates, and launched a smartphone app for their Voice of Jihad website, available in multiple languages. Their videos, once grainy, are sleek and widely shared.
The Taliban’s digital revamp has coincided with the rise of their rival, Islamic State, which early on surprised the world with its deft command of social media and highly-produced propaganda videos.
“Our audience and readers can decide for themselves whose team is stronger on social media,” said Imran Khalil, a self-taught Web developer who heads the Taliban’s tech team from an undisclosed location. “I mean, the Islamic Emirate has a much longer history than ISIS,” he said, using the formal name that the Taliban have given their movement.
The Taliban are far stronger in Afghanistan than Islamic State, but in public messaging the long-running insurgency is playing catch-up with its upstart rival.
From their hide-outs on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border, Taliban have started accounts on open platforms that often stayed below the radar of the companies that operate them. In late 2015, the group began using Telegram Messenger for official communications, following a similar move early in the year by Islamic State, whose technical experts had determined the messaging app was among the most secure encrypted platforms.
When Taliban fighters stormed a government security compound in April, they gave live updates of the attack on their public Telegram channel. A Telegram Messenger spokesman didn’t respond to requests to comment.
In March, the Taliban tech team headed by Mr. Khalil rolled out the Taliban’s Voice of Jihad app, designed for smartphones powered by the Google Android operating system. The idea was to make the group’s online content—updates from the front line, propaganda videos and official statements—more accessible to Afghans, who go online mainly through their mobile phones. “It became a priority for us,” said Mr. Khalil.
The stepped-up digital outreach comes as the Taliban, through its media office, has been trying to play down the appearance of growing divisions within the insurgency, even as rival factions battle each other in parts of the country. It also comes as companies, governments and hackers intensify efforts to confront extremist activity online.
The Taliban’s English-language website has been off line for weeks. A hacker tied to an online counter-extremism group called GhostSec claimed credit for taking it down. “It was not easy, I had to gather a lot information for it to happen,” the hacker, who goes by the name Paladin, said in an email.
The Taliban website likely used technology from web-security provider CloudFlare to protect it from possible cyberattacks, said Paladin, who last week claimed responsibility for taking down the Persian-language version of the website as well.
Matthew Prince, the chief executive officer of CloudFlare, said the San Francisco-based firm works closely with government authorities to counter extremist activity online. “When we get notice that there is a site that is using us that may be illegal or involving content that may be problematic, we reach out to our contacts in law enforcement,” he said.
Mr. Prince said he wasn’t aware that the Taliban may have been using CloudFlare technology before their sites were knocked off line.
Social media providers repeatedly shut down accounts affiliated with extremists. In the aftermath of the November attacks in Paris claimed by Islamic State, Telegram banned hundreds of public channels affiliated with the group, and vowed to continue to do so.
Days after the Taliban app surfaced in late March on Google’s Play store, the company quickly deleted it. It appeared soon after on Amazon.com Inc.’s Appstore, where it was also taken down. The two companies said they prohibit apps that contain illegal or offensive content.
Asked why Google removed the app, a person familiar with the matter said it had violated company policies that prohibit hate speech, violence and illegal activities on Google Play. An Amazon spokeswoman said, “All apps in the Amazon Appstore must adhere to our content guidelines and the app in question is no longer available from our store.”
Amazon says on its website that it reviews all apps submitted to its store to ensure they comply with its protocols and don’t include offensive material, violate copyright or contain malicious code, among other things.
A spokesman for Alphabet Inc.’s Google said that the company previously relied on automated scans of apps for policy violations and on users to flag potential problem apps. In March 2015, the company launched a new system in which employees review every app that is submitted. The spokesman said Google made the change to expedite app approvals but didn’t say how humans would approve apps faster than software.
The Taliban app continues to be available elsewhere, however. The Taliban media team has promoted the link to download it through their accounts on messaging services and social media platforms.
“We are trying to make the most of modern facilities to suit our needs,” Zabiullah Mujahid, the group’s spokesman, said in a recent note sent through the messaging service Viber.
Afghanistan’s Interior Ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqqi sees the group’s stepped-up communication effort as a way to deflect attention from their military failures. “Since the Taliban have been defeated by Afghan security forces on the battlefield, they are now using propaganda to distort people’s minds,” he said. “But they can’t achieve anything through their propaganda.”
Touting battlefield victories—real and inflated—is a big focus of their digital outreach. After an Afghan army helicopter crashed in the mountainous province of Kunar in March, the militants emailed journalists with a link to a video of the incident filmed from three different angles. The group claimed credit for the crash, which the government instead attributed to a technical malfunction.
Greater online visibility also carries greater risks for jihadists. Mr. Mujahid, the Taliban spokesman, on one occasion forgot to switch off the tracking system linked to his Twitter account, which revealed he was tweeting from neighboring Pakistan—an embarrassment for a movement that claims to operate from Afghan soil. He dismissed the revelation as an “enemy plot.”http://www.wsj.com/articles/afghanistans-taliban-push-into-new-media-1465776097
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