The video that became prominent last week is one of several on a new State Department YouTube channel in English aimed at disaffected young Western Muslims who may be wowed by the Islamic State’s battlefield momentum. The countermessage is simple: These guys are lying to you, and if you go to Syria to fight Western oppression you’ll just end up killing innocent Muslims.
The 50-employee Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications is the State Department office behind the video. The organization was launched in 2011 to analyze and answer militant activity on social media and does most of its work in languages other than English.
The English-language YouTube channel was created in a rush in July as part of an expanded online message campaign following the fall of the strategic Iraqi city of Mosul to Islamic State militants, the senior State Department official said.
The same video was first posted in Arabic in July, and that version has more than 42,000 views on YouTube.
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