Nancy Pelosi may have had a difficult time explaining how the Obama administration’s strategy against ISIS was succeeding, but she did get one thing right — the need to counter ISIS propaganda. The terrorist marauders have poured money and effort into online recruitment, both to inspire terrorist attacks in Western nations and to get young people to come to the battlefield. Their propaganda specifically targets teenage girls with flowery videos about family life in ISIS-controlled areas of Syria and Iraq, and it’s been effective. Western nations have seen hundreds of girls and young women surreptitiously cross the border into ISIS’ hands, rarely to escape again afterward.

The State Department has tried pushing back with a counter-propaganda campaign, but find it difficult to compete with ISIS for those hearts and minds. Having the Associated Press work on ISIS’ behalf doesn’t make it any easier. The AP’s Sarah El Deeb writes a single-sourced paean to romance in the heart of the caliphate, barely making mention of the horrific atrocities ISIS wreaks on women in particular:

The honeymoon was a brief moment for love, away from the front lines of Syria’s war. In the capital of the Islamic State group’s self-proclaimed “caliphate,” Syrian fighter Abu Bilal al-Homsi was united with his Tunisian bride for the first time after months chatting online. They married, then passed the days dining on grilled meats in Raqqa’s restaurants, strolling along the Euphrates River and eating ice cream.

It was all made possible by the marriage bonus he received from the Islamic State group: $1,500 for him and his wife to get started on a new home, a family — and a honeymoon.

“It has everything one would want for a wedding,” al-Homsi said of Raqqa — a riverside provincial capital that in the 18 months since IS took control has seen militants beheading opponents and stoning alleged adulteresses in public.

Of the 968 words dedicated to Love ISIS Style, El Deeb dedicates less than a hundred to the brutal oppression women experience in jihadi-controlled areas. Instead of dwelling on thousands of documented cases of atrocities including rape and slavery, El Deeb takes the word of her single source — a jihadi fighter — that he’s a sweetheart of a husband. He bought her kittens!

During the few days of their honeymoon, al-Homsi and his bride enjoyed Raqqa’s relative tranquility, riverside promenades and restaurants.

Then the couple travelled back to the Homs area, where IS fighters are holding ground against Assad’s forces and rival rebel groups.

There, al-Homsi used the money from his grant to prepare a home for his new bride, and four kittens. The couple is now expecting a new baby and hoping for another cash injection, as the group can pay up to $400 as a bonus for each child.

Well, isn’t that nice — and isn’t it nice for the Associated Press to unquestionably repeat and amplify the testimony of an ISIS operative? What better propaganda can ISIS hope to create than an uncritical repetition of the same nonsense spewed in their online recruitment videos?

Perhaps El Deeb and her editors could have balanced the report with testimony from Zainab Bangura. The UN special representative on sexual violence in conflict paints a much different picture of “romance” in ISIS:

After attacking a village, [the Islamic State] splits women from men and executes boys and men aged 14 and over. The women and mothers are separated; girls are stripped naked, tested for virginity and examined for breast size and prettiness. The youngest, and those considered the prettiest virgins fetch higher prices and are sent to Raqqa, the IS stronghold.

There is a hierarchy: sheikhs get first choice, then emirs, then fighters. They often take three or four girls each and keep them for a month or so, until they grow tired of a girl, when she goes back to market. At slave auctions, buyers haggle fiercely, driving down prices by disparaging girls as flat-chested or unattractive.

We heard about one girl who was traded 22 times, and another, who had escaped, told us that the sheikh who had captured her wrote his name on the back of her hand to show that she was his “property.”

The Washington Post’s Ishaan Tharoor puts this in perspective:

Estimates vary, but there are believed to be somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 women enslaved by the Islamic State. Many are Yazidis, a persecuted minority sect that the extremist Islamic State considers to be apostate “devil-worshippers,” in part because of the Yazidis’ ancient connection to the region’s pre-Islamic past. The jihadists’ treatment of Yazidi women, in particular, has been marked out by its contempt and savagery.

Today’s AP report will do nothing except deliver more victims for ISIS to brutalize. It’s not reporting — it’s taking dictation to disseminate propaganda on behalf of bloodthirsty maniacs at the expense of young women everywhere. This is nothing short of shameful.