A research conducted by a team at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point said that “the vaunted propaganda operations of the Islamic State, which helped lure more than 30,000 foreign fighters to Syria and Iraq, have dropped off drastically as the extremist group has come under military pressure.”
According to the researchers, when the group was expanding by taking control over cities and territory in Syria and Iraq, and later in Libya and elsewhere, that message resonated with some young Muslims across the Middle East and North Africa, in some European countries and, on a smaller scale, even in the United States.
But as the military campaign by the United States and its allies has shrunk the Islamic State’s field and killed some of its leaders, it has started to look less like a religious state with a future and more like an eroding terrorist army.
Daniel Milton, the director of the research, said “it’s not just the numeric decline; the caliphate was their big selling point, now there’s an inability to say we’re doing the things that make us a state. And that was behind their broad appeal.”
For more details, watch the full report in the video above