Iraq needs to mock Isis propaganda more effectively, says Malcolm Turnbull

The Iraqi government needs to “mock and disprove” Islamic State’s online propaganda more effectively and more quickly Malcolm Turnbull has told an elite audience in Washington, saying he will raise the problem when he meets US president Barack Obama. The Australian prime minister also called for “creative pragmatism” and a “recognition that difficult compromises will be required” in finding a settlement to the Syrian war, including “institutional power sharing” or even the possibility of a partition of the country.

Turnbull used the speech to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies to warn leaders against unwittingly aiding Isis, by blaming Islam or all Muslims for the group’s actions or accepting Isis’s own overblown rhetoric about its power and achievements.

“We should remember that terrorism is a strategy of the weak, deployed against the strong. We should not, as the president observed last week, allow ... Isil to lead us into exaggerating its power,” he said.

“Their threat to sweep across continents like the armies of Muhammad, to stable their horses in the Vatican, are crazed delusions, we should not amplify them. The coalition will win, by targeting Isil militarily, using local ground forces supported by coalition air power, weapons and training, curbing Isil finances, stopping foreign fighter flows and pursuing political resolution and reconciliation in Syria and Iraq,” he said.

But he added that there was “one element of our campaign ... that needs considerable improvement.”

“Isil may have an archaic and barbaric ideology, but its use of technology and social media, in particular, is very sophisticated... As Isil uses social media for its propaganda, we must respond rapidly and persuasively with the facts. It was clear to me from my recent visit, that the Iraqi government and other anti-Isil forces are not reacting quickly enough to contradict Isil’s online messages, which have been used both to recruit new fighters and demoralise those who oppose them and we should help them with this. Isil claims must be mocked and disproved as soon as they are made ... the cyber sphere demands reactions as rapid as the kinetic battlefield. “