London - A new video campaign intended to combat the radicalisation of young Muslims has been devised by former British military personnel with experience of psychological operations in war zones.
Sven Hughes, who served as a reservist in Afghanistan with 15 (UK) Psychological Operations Group, has designed an advertising campaign aimed at stemming the flow of British recruits to Isis.
The #notanotherbrother campaign, which is being shown on YouTube, opens with a powerful film of a young British “foreign fighter” reading a letter from his elder brother, who apologises for unwittingly encouraging him to join the terror group.
The film was commissioned by the Quilliam Foundation, a think-tank that counters extremism, and was made by Verbalisation, an advertising agency founded by Mr Hughes.
“We have got some very nasty people doing some very effective messaging to very vulnerable communities and it's about time some people stood up with the skills to counter-narrative them,” he said.
Verbalisation also recently worked on countering the propaganda of the Nigerian extremist group Boko Haram. It uses the expertise of psychological operations and military experts as well as marketers, linguists and anthropologists. Several members of the company's staff have served in theatres of war. Mr Hughes, 41, also worked as a consultant in Afghanistan building links with Afghan communities.
Verbalisation, whose clients have included the European Parliament, runs the Centre for Applied Intelligence, a think-tank which has developed a programme called Rapid Audience Insight Diagnostic (Raid), which claims to “drive effective behaviour change through language”.
Mr Hughes, who worked as a senior marketer in Sir Martin Sorrell's WPP empire, denied there was anything sinister in Verbalisation's military connections. “It's all too easy to paint us as some shadowy organisation - we are not. We have a transparent website and our client list is open for everyone to see,” he said. “We are not about dark arts, what we do is provide narratives and counter-narratives.”
Haras Rafiq, Quilliam's managing director, said Verbalisation's expertise fitted with his own organisation's experience of working with reformed extremists.
He said the choice of wording in the #notanotherbrother script drew on the expertise of former jihadists. Among the phrases seen as crucial to the advert's impact were “hero”, reflecting the aspirations of many jihadists, and “come back”, to emphasise the sense of loss of their families.
“Brother” or “bruv” were used to convey not just the fraternal relationship in the story but for street slang credibility and to mirror Isis propaganda of being an alternative family.
The #notanotherbrother film, which was made with a budget raised by crowdfunding, is the first in a series.
15 (UK) Psychological Operations was set up by the British after the first Gulf War, inspired by the success of US “psy-ops” units.
In Afghanistan, its work has included establishing radio stations offering music and drama and schemes aimed at protecting children from spent ordnance.
The unit has now been subsumed into the Army's 77th Brigade.
The Independent