They continue, "Filming an attack has become an integral part of the attack itself." As Army Lieutenant Colonel Terry Guild (at the time focusing on Information Operations) explained:
They use a video camera as a mechanism to upload data on to a website, to al Jazeera, the way we use conventional weapons. It is part of their Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures. A U.S. soldier does a pre-combat inspection, he checks and makes sure he's got his bullets, his water, all that stuff. Well, our enemy is doing that, those pre-combat checks [but they] include making sure that the video guy is there with the camera, with batteries, to either courier that video to some safe house or to get it uploaded to some website, make sure that what they're doing, that message gets out. And it's engrained … [it] would be unusual if they did not do it. A lot of it has to do with status. The bigger the attack the more video and the more media exposure, it seems [as if the more] these guys gain notoriety, [the more they] gain rank within the network.[1]
How important has this been to the efforts of the insurgency in Iraq? Between June and roughly November 2007 (in other words, roughly the period corresponding to the surge of additional forces to Baghdad), American forces captured and destroyed eight media labs belonging to al-Qaeda in Iraq. Two were in Baghdad, two were in Mosul, one in Diyala near Baquba, one in Samarra, and one in Garma. In the eight labs, they found a total of 23 terabytes of material that had not yet been uploaded to the web. Although in some cases the labs were discovered in the course of other operations, coalition forces:
19
- ↑ Lieutenant Colonel Terry Guild, Interview with the Author, MacDill AFB, Tampa, FL, August 15, 2006.
