The Rise of Jihadist Propaganda on Social Networks
RRise of Jihadist Propaganda 1
The Rise of Jihadist Propaganda on Social Networks
Adam Badawy, Emilio Ferrara * University of Southern California, Information Sciences Institute * Corresponding author: [email protected] Using a dataset of over 1.9 million messages posted on Twitter by about 25,000 ISIS members, we explore how ISIS makes use of social media to spread its propaganda and to recruit militants from the Arab world and across the globe. By distinguishing between violence-driven, theological, and sectarian content, we trace the connection between online rhetoric and key events on the ground. To the best of our knowledge, ours is one of the first studies to focus on Arabic content, while most literature focuses on English content. Our findings yield new important insights about how social media is used by radical militant groups to target the Arab-speaking world, and reveal important patterns in their propaganda efforts.
Keywords:
Computational Social Science, Social Media, Twitter, ISIS, Islamic Radicalization. ise of Jihadist Propaganda 2
The Rise of Jihadist Propaganda on Social Networks Introduction
Militant groups have long used traditional media and the Internet to disseminate information, spread their propaganda, and recruit potential militants (Cohen-Almagor, R. 2012). But no group to date has been as savvy in terms of its propaganda campaign and recruiting terrorists via the Internet, and specifically via social media platforms, as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) (Shane & Hubbard, 2014). ISIS used a panoply of platforms, such as: Facebook, Instagram, Tumbler, Ask.fm, and most prominently, Twitter to spread its message (Bodine-Baron et al 2016). The group uses a very successful strategy of having an “online battalion” or the so-called “the mujtahidun (industrious)”, that is likely a small group of 500-2,000 active online members who post and retweet certain tweets to make these messages trending, increasing the group’s exposure and outreach (Berger & Morgan, 2015). Previous research worked on understanding ISIS’s social media presence (Bazan, Saad, and Chamoun, 2015; Klausen, 2015; Rowe and Saif, 2016; Ferrara, 2017) and the process of online radicalization (Bermingham et al. 2009; Edwards and Gribbon, 2013; Torok, 2013) that potential recruits go through. In this paper, we aim at identifying the topics that ISIS focuses on and investigate how offline events affect ISIS’s online rhetoric. We thus attempt to answer the following two questions: (i)
What are ISIS members and sympathizers talking about on Twitter and how would we categorize their conversations? (ii)
How are external events reflected in the ISIS Twittersphere? Using a dataset containing all the Twitter posts of about 25,000 ISIS members and sympathizers, totaling over 1.9 million tweets generated from January 2014 to June 2015, we analyzed the Arabic content of the tweets to answer these questions. The reason for exclusive focus on Arabic content is that the majority of ISIS members come from the Arab world; Arabic is the most used language among ISIS members and sympathizers (Magdy et al. 2016; Berger & Morgan, 2015); and prior studies rarely focused on the Arabic content due to the numerous technical challenges. Additionally, Arabic posts constitute over 92% of ISIS activity in our dataset. In this study, we adopt state-of-the-art machine learning tools paired with human annotations to overcome these computational limits. Our study is not the first to be concerned with identifying the topics and rhetoric that radical groups come to focus on and adopt (Haverson et al. 2011, Lee and Leets, 2009, Leuprecht et al. 2010, Payne, 2009). Smith et al. (2008) found that violent groups tend to focus on in-group affiliation, having an impact and confidence in victory. Moreover, they describe themselves using morality, religion, and aggression rhetoric more than non-violent counterparts. Our study supports similar hypotheses: we will show that ISIS members talk mainly about topics related to violence and Islamic theology, with a strong sectarian tone in certain circumstances. Moreover, we will bring evidence that important offline events are strongly intertwined with online conversation, with certain topics dominating the conversation right before or after ISIS’s activity spikes. For example, we will show that increases in the incitement of violence by ISIS supporters and sympathizers on Twitter correlates with certain types of violent offline events; we will notice a steep rise in the theological talk following ISIS self-proclaiming itself a caliphate; concluding, we will observe an increase in the sectarian tone when the Iranian and Iraqi governments engage with ISIS. ise of Jihadist Propaganda 3
Materials and Methods Data Collection
We used a dataset of accounts associated with ISIS members and sympathizers. The identification of these accounts has been manually performed and validated in two stages: first, a crowd-sourcing initiative called
Lucky Troll Club leveraged hundreds of volunteer annotators with expertise in Arabic to identify suspicious accounts that could be tied to ISIS, and reported them to Twitter. The usernames and account IDs of these users were compiled in a publicly-available list. Twitter’s anti-abuse team manually verified all suspension requests, and suspended all the accounts related to ISIS based on the violation of Twitter’s Terms of Service policy against terrorist- or extremist-related activity (Ferrara et al. 2016). Of the
Lucky Troll Club we retained only the accounts that have been actually suspended by Twitter via the double-verification mechanism. This yielded a little over 25,000 Twitter accounts associated with ISIS as an object of this study. These users were responsible for posting over 1.9 million tweets from January 2014 to June 2015. All these tweets were obtained through the Observatory on Social Media database (OSoMe) set up by Indiana University (Davis et al., 2016), which continuously collects the Twitter data stream from the Twitter API (a 10% random sample of the full Twitter data stream). This allowed us to obtain a large sample of the activity of these ISIS accounts, an important technical advantage since studies using small-sample data have shown well known biases (Morstatter et al., 2013).
Data Analysis
The first step of data cleaning was to retain only tweets in Arabic. This process removed about 8% of the tweets in the original dataset, the remainder 92% being written in Arabic. We then processed the tweets by means of so-called tokenization, using the NLTK tokenizer (Nltk). Tokenization is the process of splitting a piece of text into individual words, namely word tokens (or tokens in short). The tokens undergo further processing: we used the ISRIStemmer to stem them (Taghva, 2005). Stemming is the process of reducing a word to its root (word stem). This will yield related words to map to the same stem. We removed all non-alphanumeric characters from the stemmed tokens, as well as all English alphabet, both in lower and upper case. Our goal is to identify the most commonly used stems in the ISIS tweets that have theoretical significance: In order to do this, we removed the stop words (using the stops words from (Alajmi, 2012) in
Table VII ) and then constructed a list of the top 100 stems used in the tweets under scrutiny. Out of the 100 top stems, 66 stems do not convey a clear meaning of what the authors are saying, such as: (To go out/exit, جرخ), (Land, ضرا), and (Do/Does, له), which leaves us with 34 stems that hold significant meanings. We decided to categorize these stems into four categories: violence, theological, sectarian, and names. The first three are the three main topics we found to be prevalent in the ISIS tweets. The last one, “Names”, includes both names of individuals as well as the Islamic State. In
Tables I & II , we provide the list of stems that make up each category, along with their frequency in the whole tweets corpus. ise of Jihadist Propaganda 4
We decided to be as conservative as possible in terms of choosing which stems would be included in these categories. For example, “Violence” only includes stems that incite violent actions. “Theological”, includes stems of words that are used frequently in Islamic theology or Fiqh. As for “Sectarian”, we included only derogatory terms of other groups, such as: “ضفر” for Rafidah (a derogatory term for Shia Muslims) (Stern & Berger 2015), “يفص” for Safawi (a derogatory term for Shia Muslims and it is the Arabized form of Safavid, the 16 th century dynasty that established Iran as a Shia State), and “رفك” and “دتر” for infidel and apostasy respectively, which can be used as derogatory terms for Shias, Yazidis, Christians and even Muslims who do not adhere to ISIS’s vision of Islam. We used this dictionary-based approach to classify each tweet. We used this approach instead of a common alternative known as “bag-of-words” i because we believe that some individuals in our dataset wrote their messages in areas of conflict where the author might have written a short message instead of a longer one due to imminent danger. As such, classifying the tweets rather than the tokens enable us to avoid introducing a systematic bias due to exogenous events. We built a tweet classifier that counts how many stems are present in each tweet that belongs to the four categories mentioned above. We applied a majority-rule to classify the tweets: for each tweet, the category with the most stems represented in that tweet would be chosen as the category of the tweet itself. If a tweet has equal and maximum number of stems from two categories, we classified it as “Other”. ii Also, if a tweet has no stems from any of the categories, we classified it as “None” and excluded it from future analysis. We isolated tweets classified as “Other,” that contain at least one stem from the “Names” category. Since “Names” is the only category that does not have one defined theme, after removing the tokens classified under this category, we used the majority-rule again to classify the tweets as either “Violence”, “Theological”, or “Sectarian”. We named these categories as “Names+Violence”, “Names+Theological” and “Names+Sectarian” to identify three extra sets of tweets that concurrently identify named entities and one of the three other topics of discussion. In
Table III , we provide examples of the tweets classified under each category.
Results
The classifier we built classified more than half of the tweets (56%) based upon the four categories mentioned in the data analysis section. In
Table IV , we report the number of tweets classified under each category, the percentage of tweets classified under each category out of the whole dataset, and the percentage of the tweets classified under each category out of the tweets that were classified in one of the categories. As for the “Other” category (
Table V ), the amount of tweets that we were able to classify under one of the three subcategories “Names+Violence”, “Names+Theological” and “Names+Sectarian”, is 55%. To represent the volume of the tweets, and how this changes over time, we plotted the ratio of each category to the whole number of the tweets in the dataset (
Figure I ). Moreover, for the “Names + ise of Jihadist Propaganda 5
Category” dataset, we plotted the ratio of each category to the whole number of tweets in the “Names” category (
Figure II ). From both figures, it appears evident that the time series fluctuate and spikes can be observed at different point in time for different thematic categories. Social media literature has reported on correlations between offline and online events in a variety of cases, including during events related to social issues and conflicts (Conover et al., 2013; Varol et al., 2014). We further investigated to see whether a relationship exists between certain offline events and the Twitter chatter among ISIS members and sympathizers. We created a list (
Table VI ) with the most important events related to the four categories of topics we outlined earlier and plotted each category separately with a customized subset of offline events, which are the most relevant to the selected category.
Figures III-VI show the ratio of the tweets in the four categories over the total number of tweets by week and the corresponding offline events related to that category. We included similar plots for the “Names + Category” classes in
Figures VII-IX . Discussion
More than half of the tweets in our dataset can be classified under the four categories we constructed: this suggests that a significant portion of chatter generated by ISIS members and sympathizers gravitates around the four issues outlined above. Two topics dominate the conversation, namely theological issues and violence. Looking at the share of these topics in the whole dataset and among those categorized suggests the importance of these two topics for ISIS: theological and violence related issues compose a little over 30% of all the tweets (and more than half of the ones classified). This fact warrants further discussion; thus, we try to draw some possible explanations. Violence plays a major part in ISIS’s brand and its appeal among ISIS followers. We suggest that ISIS transformed the goal of many Islamist groups. Since the foundation of al-Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden advocated focusing on the “head of the snake”, as he called the USA. He is arguing that once one destroys the source of “evil” that dominates Muslim countries, its puppets (Arab and Muslim leaders) would consequently lose power, and Islamic lands would be freed. This message insisted on gradualism and portrayed the battle between Jihadists and the US and its supporters in the context of David vs. Goliath. On the other hand, ISIS, from the start, refused to portray itself as an underdog, focusing on its victories, atrocious violent acts against minorities (and particularly, Shias, whom they used as a target in order to gain support among certain sectors of the Sunni community), and its call for an Islamic state. This was an intentional posture, which is reflected profoundly in its message to: 1) excite and attract many young men and women to this “exciting” and “victorious” journey that brings pride to its participants, and 2) to escape the spiritual hegemony of al-Qaeda-central and Ayman al-Zawahiri’s attempts to control the jihadi scene in Iraq and Syria. Therefore, we see a strong emphasis on violence-related topics in ISIS’s Twittersphere. iii
Our results confirm this possible explanation: we see a trend of violence-related rhetoric rising around some of the offline events we outlined. Four events stand out: the crucifixions in Raqqa (Abdelaziz, 2014), the invasion of Mosul and Tikrit (Saddem Hussein’s hometown, a place of symbolic importance) by ISIS, the invasion of Sinjar (Yazidi town), and the ise of Jihadist Propaganda 6 taking over of the Shaer gas field. All these events, annotated in the timelines, align faithfully with conversation spikes online (
Figure III ). As for the “Names + Violence” tweets, we see the same pattern of relationship with the crucifixions (
Figure VII ). These results provide support for our prior expectations and theoretical interpretations. For the theological tweets (
Figure IV ), we plotted the announcement of the caliphate and the sectarian events. Here, we expected a sharp rise in theological talk after the caliphate announcement, and suspected that ISIS, after inflicting violence upon minorities, would engage in theological defense and justifications for its actions. In line with what we hypothesized, we see a sharp increase in Twitter discussions among ISIS members and sympathizers after ISIS self-pronounced itself a caliphate, suggesting how important the perception of this event was among ISIS followers. For the “Names + Theological” tweets, we again see the same sharp rise in tweet volume after the announcement of the caliphate (
Figure VIII ). It is worth noting that ISIS’s digital magazine
Dabiq focused on legitimizing the caliphate since the announcement of its establishment (Winter, 2015). This should not be surprising, since the concept of the caliphate plays a crucial role in political Islam and arguably in Islamic theology or Fiqh. To many Islamists, Muslims need an “Islamic” state where they can live their lives under the guidance of the Sharia, or in their view free from exogenous corrupting influences. The need for an Islamic state, especially since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, has been a motivating cause for many Islamic groups, including the groups that some might see as moderate, such as the Muslim Brotherhood. iv For the “Sectarian” category plots (
Figure V ), we can see that the tweets under this category spiked in correlation with events that involves ISIS’s sectarian enemies, most notably the Iranian and the Iraqi governments. For example, around mid-June of 2014, when Iran deployed forces to aid the Shia-dominated Iraqi government take back Tikrit and when the latter asked the US to conduct airstrikes against ISIS, we see very visible spikes in the ISIS Twittersphere that include derogatory terms regarding Shias and others in general. Another very clear spike in the usage of such derogatory terms happened the Iraqi government launched a massive campaign to get back Tikrit in March of 2015. For the “Names + Sectarian” class, we see the same pattern: events involving the Iranian or Iraqi government usually coincide with, or slightly precede, spikes in this kind of tweets (
Figure IX ). Since the “Names” category includes names of various entities, we did not have a uniform expectation regarding the relationship of any specific offline event and the tweets classified under this category, except for the announcement of the caliphate. The “Names” category includes three stems related to the caliphate: a sharp rise in this category after the announcement of the caliphate by the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, appears as expected. (
Figure IV ). Conclusion
The chaos in the aftermath of the US invasion and withdrawal from Iraq and the popular uprising against Assad in Syria in 2011 created a vacuum that enabled groups like ISIS to form. But why did ISIS and not another group emerge as the most important and powerful organization in this context? A major reason behind that, is its spectacular ability to spread its violent and nihilistic ise of Jihadist Propaganda 7 message further and better than any of if its rivals, including established groups like, al-Qaeda. The most prominent way for ISIS to spread its propaganda is through online social platforms, most prominently Twitter. Thus, we attempted, using a dataset of millions of tweets posted by ISIS members and sympathizers during the one-year timeframe that witnessed ISIS’s rise, to capture what these members are talking about, what message they wanted to convey and how events on the ground affect the Twittersphere. We concluded that violence, Islamic theology, and sectarianism play a crucial role in ISIS messaging. In some cases, ISIS emphasis on some topics of discussion slightly anticipated events on the ground: for example, the use of sectarian language online toward those entities perceived as adversaries was systematic prior to executions and attacks. In other cases, ISIS focused on certain topics as an aftermath of offline events: this was the case, for example, when ISIS inflicted violence upon minorities, and then engaged online in theological defense and justifications for its actions. Possibly, the most prominent event during this period, in terms of its importance and perceived meaning to ISIS sympathizers, was the announcement of the caliphate. This event was both preceded and followed by several shocks in the Twittersphere, with multiple spikes occurring across different categories of discussion shortly before and slightly after the event. In conclusion, our work shed light on the ability of ISIS to systematically and programmatically corroborate its agenda with remarkable coordinated activity on social media.
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to Max Abrahms (Northeastern University) for useful discussions, and to Alessandro Flammini and Onur Varol (Indiana University) for their support in collecting the Twitter dataset. This work has been partly funded by the Office of Naval Research (ONR), grant no. N15A-020-0053. This research is also based upon work supported in part by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA). The views and conclusions contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of ODNI, IARPA, ONR, or the U.S. Government. The U.S. Government had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for governmental purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation therein. ise of Jihadist Propaganda 8
References ise of Jihadist Propaganda 9 ise of Jihadist Propaganda 10
Rowe, M., & Saif, H. (2016, May). Mining pro-ISIS radicalisation signals from social media users. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Web and Social Media. Saad, S., Chamoun, M., & Bazan, S. B. (2015, June). Infowar on the Web: When the Caliphate goes Online. In Proceedings of the ACM Web Science Conference (p. 53). ACM. Shane, S., & Hubbard, B. (2014). ISIS displaying a deft command of varied media. New York Times, 30. Smith, A. G., Suedfeld, P., Conway III, L. G., & Winter, D. G. (2008). The language of violence: Distinguishing terrorist from nonterrorist groups by thematic content analysis. Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict, 1(2), 142-163. Stern, J., & Berger, J. M. (2015). ISIS: the state of terror. New York, NY: Ecco Press, an imprint of HarperCollins. Torok, R. (2013). Developing an explanatory model for the process of online radicalisation and terrorism. Security Informatics, 2(1), 1. Taghva, K., Elkhoury, R., & Coombs, J. S. (2005, April). Arabic Stemming Without A Root Dictionary. In ITCC (1) (pp. 152-157). Varol, O., Ferrara, E., Ogan, C. L., Menczer, F., & Flammini, A. (2014, June). Evolution of online user behavior during a social upheaval. In Proceedings of the 2014 ACM conference on Web science (pp. 81-90). ACM. Winter, C. (2015). Documenting the Virtual “Caliphate”. Quilliam Foundation, 33. ise of Jihadist Propaganda 11
Tables, Figures & Lists Table I
Violence
Theological
Stem
Translation Frequency Stem Translation Frequency لتق
To kill 88732 فلخ Caliph 80664 دهج
Jihad 66268 بسح Judgment Day 76116 دهش
Martyr 38027 دمح To Thank 70131 كرع
Fight 36195 نيد Religion 67908 فذح
Delete 34718 ربك To call for 56710 برح
War 29030 دحو To unite and it is usually used to express belief in one God 44225 فصق
Bomb 27534 خيش Shiekh 37630 رجف “Fajr” or dawn but also mean to explode 24149 محر To have Mercy 37369 حتف
Stem for military conquest in a religious sense 22927 لسر Messenger 32847 يلو To rule or to be appointed to rule 30352 عرش Stem for Sharia 25916 روس Verse or wall 22664 ise of Jihadist Propaganda 12
Table II
Names
Sectarian
Stem Translation Frequency Stem Translation Frequency ةيملاسلإا_ةلود
Islamic State (ISIS in Arabic/how they liked to be called) 111892 ضفر To refuse, although here it would be a derogatory term for Shias 66449 ةفلاخلا_رابخا
The Caliphate News 65340 يفص Stem for a derogatory term for Shias 40939 ةفلاخلا_ةلو
The Caliphate State 52864 رفك Disbelief or Infidel 32967 شعد
Stem for ISIS 30336 دتر Can be the stem for apostasy, also used as derogatory term for adherents of others sects and religions 24884 دسا
Literally means lion, but here probably referring to Assad, whose name means lion in Arabic برغ
West 26475 رمع
Omar (name) or age 23504 برع
Arabs 22328 مزحلا_ةفصاع
Decisive Storm- military operation led by Saudi Arabic in Yemen 22153 ise of Jihadist Propaganda 13
Table III v Category
Date Tweet
Names
Translation : The Arab Nation is divided into two sections: one, its head is eaten by rust, this section believes in the lies of the media and so-called “scholars” of the television and the other section, started looking for the truth by itself 5/5/2015 تحبصأ هتميزهو تاهبجلا لك ىلع عجارتي دسلاا راشب نا دكوت ضرلاا ىلع عئاقولانمو ةيقذلالا
Translation :
Sectarian
Translation : These are the Muslims who fight (Jihad in the verb tense) Iraq’s Shias and your leaders support the Shias against them (presumingly, the Sunnis), so what the difference (in Iraqi dialect) between a Rafidi Houthi vi and a Rafidi Iraqi. 5/29/2015 راد رقع يه ةيدوعسلا يف ةيقرشلا قطانملا نأ فرعيلا نم ةنسيسح يأ برضنسيملاعإ للحم نوكي نأ هل قحيلا برعلا ةريزج ضفاور Translation : We will attack any Hussainiya, vii who does not know that the eastern parts of Saudi Arabia is the stronghold of the Arabian Peninsula’s (Saudi Arabia) Rafidah does not deserve to be a media analyst
Theological
Translation : Let the world know, the fact that he entered the Kaaba does not change the fact that he is a Zindiq viii , the idol has been broken, this is a slap on the face for anybody that believes that rebelling against the “traitor of the two holy places” (a word play on the title of the Saudi Kings, “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques”) and the Legal guardian (ruler in Islamic Fiqh) cannot be permitted (according to Islamic law) 4/24/2015 لك نمو ،ًاجرـف ٍمه لك نم هل الله لعج رافغتسلاا مزل نم :ملاسلاو ةلاصلا هيلع لاقبستحي لا ثيح نم هقزرو ،ًاجرخم ٍقيض
Translation : (This is a saying by Prophet Mohamed) Peace and prayers be upon him said: “If anyone constantly seeks pardon (from Allah), Allah will appoint for him a way out of every distress and a relief from every anxiety, and will provide sustenance for him from where he expects not." (Hadith)
Violence ise of Jihadist Propaganda 14
Translation : It is very necessary to open all fronts in all revolting/rebellious provinces and that is in order to lessen the burden on Ramadi (city in central Iraq) and its rebellious neighborhoods and to distract/divide the forces of Nouri the traitor (referring to Nouri el-Maliki, the former prime minister of Iraq). 6/6/2015 ةيملاسلإا ةلودلا دونج نم يدنج .. ةقور سنأ وبأ رجاهملا خلأا داهشتسا أبن مكل فزنةقرلا ةيلاو قرش كراعم يف كلذو
Translation : We announce (with pleasure) the news of brother Abu Anas Warqa’ (the migrant) martyrdom, a solider among the soldiers of the Islamic State, and his martyrdom occurred in the battles of east Al-Raqqah Province.
Table IV
Categories
Number Out of the Total (%) Out of the Categorized (%) Names
Other
Sectarian
Theological
Violence
None
Total number of Tweets = 1,933,016; Total number of Tweets Categorized = 1,086,104
Table V
Names + Categories
Number Out of the Total Names Dataset (%) Theological
Violence
Other
Sectarian
Total number of Names + Categories Tweets = 144,081
Table VI
Name
Date Event Description
Crucifixions
Mosul and Takrit Captured ise of Jihadist Propaganda 15
Iran Deploys
Iraq (USA Support)
Caliphate
Shaer Gas Battle
Sinjar Captured
Kobani Caputred
Violent Acts
Takrit Liberated ise of Jihadist Propaganda 16
Yazidis Released
Christian Killings
Palmyra Captured
Shite Attack
Table VII
Stem Translation يف In نم From نأ That يلع On يلإ To يتلا Which نع About لا No ام What اذه
This (Male) هذه
This (Female) ناك
It was عم With و And كلذ
That نيب
Between مل Did not دعب
After لك All يذلا
Which ise of Jihadist Propaganda 17
Figure I ise of Jihadist Propaganda 18
Figure II
Figure III ise of Jihadist Propaganda 19
Figure IV Figure V ise of Jihadist Propaganda 20
Figure VI
Figure VII ise of Jihadist Propaganda 21
Figure VIII Figure IX ise of Jihadist Propaganda 22
Notes i The bag-of-words model is a simplifying representation used in natural language processing where a piece of text is represented as the bag (multiset) of its words, disregarding grammar and even word order but keeping multiplicity. ii “Five” in the code iii For more on the subject, read chapter eight “The AQ - ISIS War” in (Stern & Berger, 2015) iv For more on the subject, read Milestones (Qutb 1964) v We used (Glen 2016) as a guide for choosing what events to put in this table. vi The Houthis are a Zaidi Shia-led religious-political movement based in Northern Yemen and is in engaged in ongoing battles with the current Yemeni government and Saudi Arabia. vii
A gathering congregation hall for Shia commemoration ceremonies to commemorate the martyrdom of Imam Hussein. viii
Term used in the medieval a ges for Muslims who “strayed from the right path and in believing in monotheism”, could be punishable by death. (Lewis 1993)could be punishable by death. (Lewis 1993)