Watch: ISIS Releases Training Camp Propaganda Video

The Islamic State (ISIS) has released a video titled “Blood of
Jihad,” though the footage is actually bloodless.

Shot in northern Iraq, the six-minute film released Sunday shows
approximately 100 recruits training in different ways: crawling on
the ground while dodging gunfire and retrieving wounded soldiers,
taking kicks to the gut, and even unleashing some Bruce Lee-style
martial arts moves on each other.

Speaking with CNN, Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic
and International Studies
suggests that the video is not actual training footage, but
their latest piece of propaganda:

This kind of hand-to-hand fighting – with automatic weapons,
mortars, artillery, vehicles  – almost never really occurs.
Throughout this entire video what you have is a stage set of
exercises. You look at them and this isn’t really a training
exercise but a video exercise.

Watch it here:

The Guardian‘s Steve Rose recently
noted that “ISIS’s global media operation appears to have two
key objectives: to provoke the US and its allies, and to recruit
from outside the Middle East. Both seem to be working.”

Vice estimates that
10,000 westerners have joined ISIS, about 100 are
Americans.

The same day the terrorist organization published “Blood of
Jihad,” they also
released a hostage video of John Cantlie, the fourth British
journalist forced to speak on ISIS’s behalf.

The Islamic State has been putting out a steady stream of
information on social media, making itself relevant in western pop
culture. Reason‘s Scott Shackford highlighted
their use of Grand Theft Auto-style animation, and I noted
their
commentary on the death of Robin Williams.

In a warzone, both sides use propaganda, and the U.S. State
Department has been
distributing information of its own through a social media
campaign called “Look Again, Turn Away.” It focuses on ISIS’s
hypocrisy and un-Islamic practices, as well as the lives of women
and children ruined or ended by the war ISIS is waging. 

On the battlefield, ISIS is gaining strategic ground, indicating
that American airstrikes are not as effective as anticipated.