Speicher Massacre: A fragmented story

Mustafa, Balsam 2022. Speicher Massacre: A fragmented story. Islamic State in Translation: Four Atrocities, Multiple Narratives, Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 39-68. (10.5040/9781350152014.ch-002)

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Abstract

This chapter investigates the first case study of the book related to the atrocity committed by ‘IS’ against hundreds of Iraqi Shia Muslim newly recruited soldiers on 12 June 2014. Although ‘IS’ used multimodal texts: images supported by captions and headlines, and tweets, it failed to establish a fully coherent narrative. I argue that there are two interpretations for such a failure. First, ‘IS’s’ reliance on Twitter as the main medium to disseminate the images of the mass killing primarily resulted in a fragmented story. ‘IS’-affiliated Twitter account through which the photos were released was rapidly blocked, shattering the sequence of the images removed. Second, unlike subsequent atrocities where detailed articles were published via Dabiq to elaborate more on the particular event in question, ‘IS’ did not issue any such report on Speicher. The lack of a detailed piece, in turn, indicates that ‘IS’ may not have yet possessed the necessary tools for a well-coordinated media machine. Although a full narrative was not presented by ‘IS’, the images and their captions helped to produce individual elements of a narrative: religious, ethnic and political....

Item Type:	Book Section
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Modern Languages
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
ISBN:	9781350152014
Last Modified:	24 Jul 2025 15:45
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/180001

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