The Islamic State, or ISIS, has released a trailer using a modded version of Grand Theft Auto on YouTube this week for an upcoming video game that will be used in efforts to recruit children and boost the moral of the mujahedin.
The Telegraph originally reported that the Islamic State’s media wing is using the video to “raise the morale of the mujahedin and to train children and youth how to battle the West and to strike terror into the hearts of those who oppose the Islamic State.” The video, which can be seen in its entirety below, is crafted to attract younger viewers and possibly sympathetic gamers while the on-screen virtual fighters shout “Allah Akbar!”
The video shows what is presumably the virtual fighters of ISIS executing law enforcement officers while dragging them out of their cars. Other scenarios include an attack on a military convoy using explosives, a hidden sniper taking out U.S. soldiers from a distance, and a team of men with assault rifles taking on another convoy at dusk.
ISIS appears to have used a modded version of Grand Theft Auto for the core of the trailer while superimposing the ISIS black and white flag over the top left of the video. The beginning has a rough translation of “Your games which are producing from you, we do the same actions the battelfields!!” Video game news and opinion site Polygon has summed up that the phrase is more likely to have read as, “We do the things you do in games, in real life on the battlefield.”
The end of the ISIS Grand Theft Auto mock up trailer shows the words, “Flames of War” and a tagline “Fighting has just begun.”
Using Grand Theft Auto as a recruiting device is a continuation of what has been a highly effective modern day propaganda effort using social media by the ISIS group. The online presence of the extremist group has run the gambit from a Twitter account featuring cute kittens to the horrific beheadings that have been reported elsewhere on The Inquisitr.
There is a certain irony of ISIS using Grand Theft Auto as a source for a video game recruitment tool. The Grand Theft Auto series has always stirred up controversy in main stream media channels on both sides of the political spectrum for its intense violence, scenes of explicit sex hidden in the game’s code ( Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas) , or prolonged torture scenes ( Grand Theft Auto V ). The latest entry into the series became the most profitable game currently on the market with sales over $2 billion for parent company of Rockstar, Take Two Interactive.
