Hybrid warfare (HY) has become the most popular term in academic, military and political circles today. References to hybrid warfare, even in an infantile form, can also be found in the Peloponnesian War of Thucydides, but also in Sun Tzu’s Art of War.
So we could say that the hybrid war and the hybrid threat accompany humanity throughout its historical course and in direct relation to war. The only thing that changes per season is its scale, speed and intensity.
The definition of hybrid warfare
Hybrid warfare is defined according to R. Aron, as the use of conventional/unconventional, tactical/disorderly, overt/covert means and the exploitation of all dimensions of war, throughout its length and breadth, to combat the superiority of conventional weapons, methods and tactics on the battlefield.
The corresponding definition defined by NATO as a hybrid threat is “coming from an existing or future adversary (state, non-state, terrorists, etc.) with the possibility of demonstrating or simultaneously using conventional and non-conventional methods to achieve its objectives”.
Study on the implementation of hybrid warfare by ISIS
One of the most well-known and contemporary cases of asymmetric hybrid threat, which we will examine, is the so-called Islamic State (ISIS).
It is known today that the ISIS it has almost disappeared from the territories of Syria and Iraq, except for some isolated small groups of it in the Syrian desert.
The threat posed by ISIS until recently was more serious than ever for two reasons: First, its ability to wage asymmetric warfare, and second, its ability to recruit foreign fighters, both at their peak. Therefore, it was necessary to cut off ISIS from these two pillars of its war machine.
ISIS, although a non-state actor, has demonstrated an almost unparalleled ability to use and obtain intelligence and effective psychological warfare. He created with professional consistency and methodology propaganda films, depicting the goals of the organization and energizing the fighters in battle, which served as a powerful recruiting tool.
ISIS has been highly adept at using social media networks, particularly YouTube, Twitter, blog posts, etc., for planning, recruiting, fundraising, marketing, and benefits from the decentralized nature of the networks and the ability of its supporters to create and operate its own public relations department to support the organization.
EMNI: The terrible intelligence service of ISIS
The mastermind behind this system under Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi was Haji Bakr (Samir Abd Mohamed Al-Khlifawi), a former Air Force colonel and Saddam Hussein’s Director of Intelligence.
The origin of EMNI was revealed by coincidence with the discovery in 2014 of documents belonging to Haji Bakr, who was the architect and creator of EMNI. He had previously been imprisoned at Abu Ghraib prisons and at Buqa Base, along with the IS leader, where they met.
He was joined by other embittered ex-nationalist Iraqi intelligence officers. EMNI employed a very large number of Baathist Axes, who served in the intelligence services of Saddam Hussein, applying the methodology for collecting and evaluating information of all kinds, for interrogations, torture, for the extermination of opponents and dissenters, for the organization of various forms of operations to achieve of an ANSK, largely similar to the methodology applied in Iraq under Saddam Hussein.
EMNI executives were considered the “cream of the crop” of the organization and were chosen accordingly, based on their faith and abilities.
Social Networking Media – The World Wide Web (WWW)
Social Media (SMS) are powerful weapons of influence, propaganda, communication, deception, etc. These are “Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Istangram” etc., which have surpassed the so far all-powerful mass media.
They are very important “tools” at the disposal of everyone with a multiplying communication network. Through them you can also inform, reveal, mislead, conceal, direct, promote ideas, things and situations and move in completely different contexts from what has been given so far.
The World Wide Web, known to all of us www (world-wide web) is the Internet, the Internet, The basic idea of the www is the combination of the technique of computer networks with the hyper-text (hypertext), in a dynamic and easy-to-use information system.
To better understand how the internet is used, we will refer to its structure. In icebergs, 91% of their volume is under water. Something similar is also true regarding the internet. The Internet, World Wide Web (www) is divided into three parts:
1. The Surface Web is the traditional world wide web that we all know. It contains more or less all the websites that we visit and that we use in our daily contacts, with applications such as Google, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo, In, Gmail, YouTube, Wikipedia, PCsteps, etc., which, however, is 10% of the used internet. The surface web provides relatively little anonymity, and most websites identify their users by their IP address.
2. The Deep Web is the part of the Internet that is not indexed by the known search engines. For example, our personal emails, our personal e-banking, etc., do not appear in search engines. So, our personal email account and e-banking practically belong to the Deep Web. Its size is 400 to 550 times that of the Surface Web.
3. The Dark Web, also known as the Charter Web or Darknet, is a very small subset of the Deep Web. The “Dark Web” is not a place, but rather a method that aims for a high level of online anonymity. It refers to websites that mask the IP addresses of servers, making it impossible to find the identity or location of users. That is, they are effectively invisible. IS used it and still uses it today in the western world for its contacts with collaborators, lone wolves, etc.
Monitoring and Internet Use
IS did not rely on any high-level techniques to monitor internet usage, but instead placed operatives in so-called “posts”, such as cafes, mosques and generally where men congregated, to listen and see what communications were being made. Wide and masterful use was being made of the oldest method of information gathering, the human factor, the well-known HUMINT (Human Intelligence) method.
Technically, computers are monitored with low-level techniques for visiting history, while widely available free programs monitor whether websites they prohibit are accessed.
The Shisbah, or IS police, often stopped those in IS areas and made sporadic checks on the cellphones of civilians and their own fighters.
For their personal communications, EMNI members learned from their predecessor terrorist organizations not to use e-mail or telephone numbers that can be traced by foreign intelligence agencies. Although ordinary IS members often used telephone communications through encrypted social media applications such as Telegram and Whats App, EMNI avoided their use.
Instead, to avoid detection and security measures, EMNI operatives relied on prearranged communications through video games, making use of video calls or in-game chat features. Communication through game platforms is inventive, as they hide and blend in among hundreds of people playing, chatting, and communicating every moment in the game.
Ways of using Social Media by the Islamic State
The Islamic State and the major terrorist organizations, such as Al-Qaeda, Al-Nusra and its affiliates, Tahrat Al-Siam, etc., used and widely use the above social media’s as platforms for propaganda, promoting ideological positions and trends, informing like-minded people about tactics actions of etc.
A relentless war is being waged even perhaps more intensely. Anyone with a modern smart phone (Smart Phone) can promote radical messages very comfortably. We are in an era of post-modern warfare. We have before us a new generation of cyber terrorists. We have before us a new “ALUMNI”, graduates from the fronts of Iraq, Syria and Libya. Cyber jihad is now an ever-evolving reality.
Means and methods of recruitment
By 2017, ISIS had posted over 1,000 videos, including its well-known preachers, propagating the utopian and mythical UMMAH, in the following ways:
ISIS has extensively and multidimensionally used the Internet for propaganda, promoting heroes, projecting martyrs of Islam, legitimizing its actions, recruiting future jihadists, informing about the Islamic encyclopedia, electronic deception, planning individual actions and providing instructions, projecting extremist tendencies and comparisons with other societies etc.
Islamic State used “free associates” through which it sought to establish contacts and relationships with Western supporters. The conversations were done through special platform like ‘Telegram’ and ‘Surespot’.
The international media in the “service” of Cyber Jihad
They were willingly or unwittingly helping the Islamist and extremist propaganda of the ISIS, reporting and showing “humanitarian events”, which move people, but selected by a jihadist “film production” group of spectacles, such as the famous organization “White Helmets” on the subject of human suffering and the victims of war, which always moves.
Coping methods, – The Tallinn handbook
To deal with this hybrid threat, NATO, with a special committee it recommended, created the so-called “Tallinn Manual”, where they unanimously agreed (among others) that the existing rules of law, which regulate ” Jus ad Bellum”, but also “Jus in Bello” apply to cyber businesses as well.
The fronts of wars are no longer linear, nor sharp. At the same time, it is also in other places where labyrinthine psychological, IT and influence operations are carried out with the internet as a key area. The Institute for International Studies (CESIS) in Rome published in the fall of 2019, extensive research specifically dedicated to the digital activity of the Islamic State.
According to CESIS, the most frequently used social media is Telegram. And according to research conducted in 2018 by the George Washington University, there are approximately 600 channels in this medium that still distribute Islamic State content today.
The research of CESIS conveys to us the image of a digital Caliphate today, which has now built a strong online communication network, technologically advanced and able to be an element of reconstruction and orientation of the fighters and sympathizers everywhere. But he concludes that the armed jihadist ideology has now proved its “endemic character”.
