UK pair prank web with phony IS battle

Twitter was the scene last week of a fake battle in a fake city with fake news coverage, as an Iraqi Shiite expat living in London named Al-Mahmoud and a friend of his, Firas, let their imaginations loose upon the Islamic State terror group and the militias fighting it.

The pair invented an Iraqi village called Shichwa and placed it just northwest of the holy city of Karbala. Using screenshots and image manipulation techniques, they made it seem not only as though Islamic State had suffered a defeat there at the hands of the Shia Popular Mobilization Committees, but also that the battle was receiving coverage on major news outlets such as CNN and Al-Arabiya, the Daily Beast reported.

“We wanted to bait the militias,” al-Mahmoud told the Daily Beast. “So my friend Firas and I said, ‘Why not invent a battle and a small village to see if the websites or social media or the government pick up the story, and this way we can see how desperate they are.”

But the name of the village should have been a giveaway that the story was a prank. A shichwa is actually a leather pouch that Iraqi peasants use to churn milk into butter.

https://twitter.com/IraqSurveys/status/606648120437534720

Al-Mahmoud said that part of the reason the prank worked was that “shichwa” is a local slang term that non-Iraqis would not understand. Still, requests for more information about the battle rolled in from both Sunni and Shiite readers.

Some readers in Saudi Arabia who fell for the story accused Islamic State of deserting Sunnis in the fake village, though Al-Mahmoud and Firas never said which sect the villagers belonged to.

“Logically, they would be Shia as we said the village was very close to Karbala,” al-Mahmoud said. “Some Syrians took the same line. But what surprised us was that in 48 hours of running the gag, pro-government Iraqis and militia fans started tweeting the news that ISIS was escaping a pitched battle and that the Hashd [the Popular Mobilization Committees] were victorious and on the move.”

Debates about the battle continued among ordinary people and Islamic State supporters, many of whom were outside Iraq and had no idea what a shichwa really was. Members of each side accused al-Mahmoud of belonging to the other.

“After 48 hours, it took some effort to get people to stop tweeting about Shichwa,” al-Mahmoud told the Daily Beast. “It probably didn’t help that we Photoshopped CNN and al-Arabiya screenshots showing news presenters talking about the battle that never was.”