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Amid mounting death tolls in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, sectarian discourse is on the rise across the Arab world—particularly in the online sphere, where extremist voices are amplified and violent imagery and rhetoric spreads rapidly. Despite this, social media also provides a space for cross-sectarian discourse and activism. Analysis of over 7 million Arabic tweets from February to August 2015 suggests that violent events and social network structures play key roles in the transmission of this sectarian and countersectarian rhetoric on Twitter.

Sectarianism and Countersectarianism Online

• The vast majority of tweets containing anti-Shia, anti-Sunni, or countersectarian rhetoric were sent from the Gulf and were especially concentrated in Saudi Arabia, mirroring Twitter’s demographic distribution across the Arab world, as well as rising tensions and regime crackdowns on the Saudi Shia population. 
   
• Anti-Shia rhetoric is much more common online than anti-Sunni or countersectarian rhetoric, reflecting the minority status of Shia throughout the region and the manner in which anti-Shia rhetoric is amplified by influential Twitter users with millions of followers.
   
• While social media has facilitated Sunni-Shia interaction online, including the coordination of joint political protest movements, today countersectarian rhetoric is often dismissed or decried as pro-Shia propaganda.

Violent Events, Social Networks, and the Diffusion of Sectarian Rhetoric

Violent events shape fluctuations in sectarian rhetoric online. In the period under study, the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen, the Tikrit offensive by Shia militias against the self-proclaimed Islamic State in Iraq, and the Islamic State bombings of Shia mosques in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait were the most influential events, producing dramatic surges in the volume of online sectarian rhetoric. While these fluctuations are noteworthy, upticks in anti-Shia and anti-Sunni hate speech are relatively short-lived.

Clerics, extremists, media outlets, and Gulf elites spread sectarian rhetoric online. Visualizing retweet networks suggests that a wide variety of influential accounts—including supporters of the Islamic State, Salafi clerics, Gulf business leaders and academics, Shia militia groups, and average Arab citizens—play key roles in the diffusion of sectarian and countersectarian rhetoric. When clerics or other trusted elites condone or encourage the use of dehumanizing and inflammatory language, they lend credence to extremist narratives and may help them to gain broader mainstream acceptance. 

Ideologically diverse Twitter users engage and argue on Twitter. The Twitter users that tweet anti-Sunni, anti-Shia, and countersectarian messages are not isolated in ideologically homogeneous communication networks, but rather engage and respond to one another’s discourse. This provides opportunities for Sunni-Shia dialogue and offers insight into how to develop more compelling countersectarian narratives.

Introduction

From fiery sermons disseminated by Salafi televangelists to gory videos circulated by the self-proclaimed Islamic State, sectarian narratives and hate speech are on the rise across the Arab world. As the conflicts in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen rage on, hostile messages and violent images circulate twenty-four hours a day through both traditional and social media channels.

While the use of sectarian language is hardly a new phenomenon, dehumanizing anti-Shia and anti-Sunni slurs are increasingly making their way into common discourse.¹ Qualitative studies and journalistic accounts suggest that the escalation of the Syrian civil war, rising sectarian violence in Iraq, and more recently, the Saudi­-led intervention in Yemen have been marked by a proliferation of intolerant rhetoric, especially anti-Shia hate speech.² Language that casts members of a religious out-group as “apostates” or false Muslims has become more widespread—among not only clerics and fighters on the ground but also average citizens—as these conflicts have intensified.³ This rise in sectarian language is particularly visible in the online sphere, where extremist voices are amplified, and viral videos can make their way across the globe in a matter of seconds.

This rise in sectarian language is particularly visible in the online sphere, where extremist voices are amplified.

At the same time, increased social media use has precipitated what has optimistically been referred to as the “democratization of communication” throughout the region, facilitating contact and cooperation across sectarian lines.⁴ For example, in the early days of the Arab Spring, Sunni and Shia activists in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia attempted, however unsuccessfully, to use Twitter and Facebook strategically to bridge divides and unite in opposition to their respective regimes.⁵ More recently, online campaigns condemning sectarian violence have emerged, especially in the aftermath of attacks on Shia mosques in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in May and June 2015.⁶

While the spread of hate speech or countersectarian messages alone may appear relatively inconsequential in the face of mounting battlefield casualties and terrorist attacks, mainstream acceptance or rejection of intolerant, divisive rhetoric can have substantive consequences on the ground. Sectarian narratives—in diverse flavors and forms—have long been exploited by ruling families, foreign occupiers, local politicians, religious leaders, and extremist groups to garner support while discrediting and dividing would-be opponents.

Today is no exception. The degree to which sectarian language and ideologies resonate with Arabs across the region in 2015 may have key geopolitical ramifications. For example, as the Sunni Gulf ruling families and state-sanctioned clerics beat war drums, they rallied their populations behind the intervention in Yemen by casting it as a sectarian battle between their fellow Sunnis and the Iran-backed Zaydi Shia Houthi rebels. Despite the complexities of the conflict, fixating on sectarian divisions rather than strategic motivations for fighting enabled them to shore up much-needed domestic support while casting those who objected as treasonous and pro-Iranian. The more readily citizens embrace sectarian narratives, the more easily rulers can consolidate power and weaken political opposition. In a different vein, when the Islamic State produces Hollywood-inspired videos peppered with anti-Shia violence and hate speech, long-standing but often latent religious differences are portrayed as elements of a divinely backed battle for dominance.⁷ When sectarian language and ideologies are more broadly accepted, violent conflicts can become more deeply entrenched and extremist groups become better able to recruit and maintain followers.

Despite these consequences for regional and global stability and security, little is known about how sectarian and countersectarian narratives spread and fluctuate over time. A unique Twitter data set collected at New York University’s Social Media and Political Participation lab—an assortment that includes almost 7 million Arabic tweets containing anti-Shia, anti-Sunni, and countersectarian keywords sent between early February and mid-August 2015—allows for analysis of the roles that violent events and social networks play in the spread of intolerant language online.⁸

Given the challenges of systematically measuring shifting sectarian attitudes—a highly sensitive topic—with survey data or other more traditional research methods, Twitter data provide an unprecedented real-time view of changing discourses over time. Furthermore, Twitter’s architecture allows for analysis of individuals’ connections to political elites, well-known clerics, vocal militants, extremist groups, and other citizens on the same platform, giving valuable, detailed insight into the structure of communication networks and the sources through which people receive information.

The data provide suggestive evidence that the online volume of sectarian and countersectarian rhetoric fluctuates dramatically in response to regional episodes of violence—particularly reacting to the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen, clashes between Shia militias and the Islamic State in Iraq, and the bombings of Shia mosques in the Gulf. Furthermore, Twitter users expressing diverse and often conflicting views frequently engage with one another and are not isolated in ideologically homogeneous echo chambers. Finally, the online sectarian narrative is driven by a diverse combination of Twitter users including prominent clerics, Shia militia leaders, Islamic State supporters, influential Saudi businessmen, popular media outlets, and average Arab users. These findings offer real-time insight into the manner in which events on the ground influence expressions of religious tolerance and intolerance in the online sphere, as well as the role that political, religious, and extremist actors play in driving this conversation.

The Vocabulary of Online Sectarianism and Countersectarianism

In the years following the escalation of the Syrian civil war, six main derogatory terms have been frequently used to disparage Shia Muslims online: rafidha (rejectionist), Hizb al-Shaytan (party of the devil), Hizb al-Lat (party of Lat), Majus (Magianism or Zoroastrianism), Nusayri (followers of Nusayr), and Safawi (Safavid).⁹ Rafidha refers to Twelver Shias, the largest of the Shia sects, and implies that they have rejected “true” Islam as they allegedly do not recognize Abu Bakr, the first caliph, and his successors as having been legitimate rulers after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. For example, Salafi cleric Abdulaziz al-Tarifi tweeted to his approximately 800,000 followers in February, “Jews and Christians did not used to collude with the rafidhaas they do today in this country and every country.”¹⁰

Similarly, Hizb al-Shaytan and Hizb al-Lat are both used in reference to the group Hezbollah and its Shia followers. Lat alludes to the pre-Islamic Arabian goddess al-Lat, who was believed to be a daughter of God. This brands Hezbollah and its supporters as a group of polytheist nonbelievers. These terms were illustrated in a tweet sent from a now-suspended Islamic State account in March 2015: “Hezbollah, Hizb al-Lat, Hizb al-Shaytan, party of Zionists, party of nonbelievers, there is no peace between you and between true Muslims.”¹¹

Nusayri is a reference to Abu Shuayb Muhammad Ibn Nusayr, the founder of the Alawite offshoot of Shia Islam during the eighth century. It implies that the Alawite religion is not divinely inspired as it follows a man, rather than God. Although it is used in diverse contexts, this term often highlights the sectarian nature of the Syrian conflict and serves to disparage Alawites. As a Sunni Iraqi woman tweeted in early August, “#Assad_crimes: a Nusayri soldier in [Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s] army tortured a Muslim Syrian man and his wife and took off her hijab in front of her husband and beat and tortured her.”¹²

Along these same lines, Majus is a derogatory term that references the pre-Islamic religion Zoroastrianism, implying that Shia Islam is nothing more than a deviant religion of the past. Illustrating the common use of this term in the Arab Twittersphere, a Sunni Bahraini man tweeted to his approximately 6,000 followers, “After Operation Decisive Storm, America gave Tikrit as a gift to the rafidha Majus Iran! America is the mother of crimes in our Arab world and the supporter of the Safawi Majusproject.”¹³

Finally, Safawi, which recalls the Safavid dynasty that ruled Persia from 1501 to 1736, is used to depict Shia ties to Iran. Sometimes the term is also used in the neologism Sahiyyu-Safawi (Zionist-Safavid) to suggest that there is a conspiracy between Israel and Iran against Sunni Muslims.

At the same time, several slurs have become more common for characterizing Sunni Muslims in sectarian discourse: Wahhabi (a follower of Abd al-Wahhab), takfiri (a Sunni Muslim who accuses another Muslim of apostasy), Nasabi (those who hate the family of Muhammad), and Ummawi (Umayyad).¹⁴ The term Wahhabi is directly affiliated with those who follow the teachings of Sunni Salafi Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the primary theologian who developed the Saudi brand of Sunni Islam. While the term is not exclusively used in a sectarian manner, it has been used in the context of the conflicts in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen to brand Sunnis as ideological proxies of Saudi Arabia. For example, the “Electronic Mahdi Army,” a Twitter account of an Iraqi Shia militia group, tweeted, “Praise God the Wahhabissurrendered and embraced the Shia doctrine of the people of the house of God’s messenger. We ask God to give guidance to all the Wahhabi Jews.”¹⁵ Similarly, the term takfiri is used as a sectarian slur to depict Sunnis as Muslims who declare other Muslims infidels.

The term Nasabi (and its plural, Nawasib) describes Sunnis as those who hate the family of Muhammad and are considered non-Muslims. As a member of the Shia-aligned Popular Mobilization Forces identified on Twitter as “Ali the Babylonian” tweeted in early August, “Oh Ali, extend the humiliation of the Nawasib!”¹⁶

Finally, the term Ummawi references the seventh and eighth century Umayyad Empire and is used to insult Sunnis as those who committed historical injustices against the Shia. For Sunnis and Shia alike, these derogatory terms elucidate long-standing historical tensions and serve to paint one another as blasphemous infidels.

For Sunnis and Shia alike, derogatory terms elucidate long-standing historical tensions and serve to paint one another as blasphemous infidels.

Regarding countersectarian rhetoric, phrases that have been commonly used to decry sectarianism online include: “no to sectarianism,” “I am Sunni, I am Shia,” “Islamic unity,” and “neither Shia nor Sunni.” These expressions, often presented in the form of hashtags, have been tweeted across the Arab world and are particularly common in condemning violence. For example, these terms often appeared alongside the viral spread of the hashtag #Before_you_blow_yourself_up, used to mock suicide bombers and call for national unity in the aftermath of the bombing of the Kuwaiti Shia mosque on June 26, 2015.¹⁷ Along these lines, a Kuwaiti businessman tweeted at the time, “I am Sunni, I am Shia, I am Kuwaiti. Those who make distinctions between us are cowards.”¹⁸

As these descriptions and examples of common sectarian and countersectarian jargon in the Arab Twittersphere suggest, such language is used by diverse Twitter users, discussing everything from sectarian foreign policy grievances to calls to violence and general intergroup relations. The proliferation of these terms in a wide variety of tweets expressing sectarian sentiments makes them useful tools for building a data set of sectarian and countersectarian tweets.

In particular, the dynamics of sectarian and countersectarian online rhetoric can be analyzed using over 160 million Arabic tweets collected through New York University’s (NYU’s) Social Media and Political Participation lab from February 3 to August 17, 2015. These tweets contained a broad set of Arabic keywords related to social and political issues as well as ongoing violence, including the terms described above. The collection was then filtered such that each tweet in the data set contained at least one derogatory sectarian reference or countersectarian keyword.¹⁹ The terms Wahhabi and takfiri were removed from the set of filters as the tweets containing these terms alone included a wide variety of content—particularly condemnation of Islamists in Egypt—that was not relevant to sectarianism. This resulted in a data set of approximately 7 million tweets, the vast majority of which contain anti-Shia rhetoric.

Demographics of the Arab Twittersphere

Since the outbreak of the Arab Spring protests, social media use among Arabs has grown exponentially, with the proportion of Arabic language tweets and tweets coming from the Middle East rising dramatically between 2011 and 2015.²⁰ Furthermore, the use of online social networks for political discussion has become increasingly common.

While social media users certainly do not form a representative sample of the Arab population, their demographic makeup has become progressively more diverse in recent years. The percentage of Arab social media users who report discussing politics, community issues, or religion online ranges from 60 to 81 percent across the region.²¹ According to the 2014 Arab Social Media Report, a recurring series produced by the Mohammed Bin Rashid School of Government’s Governance and Innovation Program that highlights and analyzes usage trends of online social networking across the Arab region, Kuwait has the highest Twitter penetration—or percentage of Twitter users in its overall population—in the Arab world, followed by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Bahrain. While second place in terms of penetration, Saudi Arabia boasts the largest total number of Twitter users in the region and is home to 40 percent of all active Twitter users in the Arab world. Thirty-seven percent of Arab Twitter users are female, and increasingly large percentages of social media users are now over thirty years old, although two-thirds of the Facebook-using population still falls in the fifteen to twenty-nine age bracket.²²

These regional disparities in levels of Twitter popularity are clearly reflected in both the geolocation and location descriptions that Twitter users in the data set list on their profiles (see figure 1). The geolocated tweets only make up a small sample of Twitter data, as it is relatively uncommon for users to enable geolocation services, but the top locations stated on the profiles of Twitter users in the data set follow a similar pattern. Of the collection of approximately 7 million tweets containing anti-Shia, anti-Sunni, or countersectarian rhetoric, the vast majority are from the Gulf and are especially concentrated in Saudi Arabia. For those tweeting anti-Shia content, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and “land of God” (a phrase often used by pro–Islamic State accounts) are the most commonly listed locations. For those tweeting anti-Sunni terms, the top locations are Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. Finally, countersectarian rhetoric was most frequently tweeted from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain.

The dominance of Saudi Arabia is likely a reflection of the fact that a substantial percentage of active Arab Twitter users are Saudi. Additionally, Saudi Arabia has a long history of sectarian tensions and is home to many Salafi clerics who are known to tweet inflammatory sectarian rhetoric. It is therefore unsurprising that sectarian tweets might be more common in Saudi Arabia than in other parts of the region, particularly given the high levels of media coverage of the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen in this period.

Violent Events and the Spread of Sectarian Rhetoric Online

Sectarian violence—whether it be perpetrated in war-torn Iraq, Syria, or Yemen, or shattering the usual calm of Kuwait or Saudi Arabia—appears to provoke a dramatic response online. Graphic videos and images circulate rapidly on Twitter, often accompanied by dehumanizing and divisive rhetoric. Emotions run high as conflicts are portrayed as existential battles between religious groups, heightening perceived threats and placing blame for atrocities committed by small minorities on all co-religionists. Visualizing fluctuations in anti-Shia, anti-Sunni, and countersectarian tweet volume over time can provide insight into the manner in which events on the ground influence expressions of religious tolerance and intolerance in the online sphere. This reinforces recent findings suggesting that sectarian violence both drives intolerance and can easily be exploited by elites to achieve sectarian aims.²³

Anti-Shia Spikes

The most dramatic spike in tweets containing anti-Shia terms in the period under study occurred following the first air strikes in Yemen in late March, as the Saudis launched Operation Decisive Storm against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels (see figure 2).²⁴ While sectarian clashes in Iraq and Syria, the release of a viral Islamic State video showing the Camp Speicher massacre of Shia Iraqi Air Force cadets, and Shia mosque bombings in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen also produced small spikes, the Yemen intervention was by far the most influential event driving anti-Shia rhetoric on social media in this period. Further demonstrating the influence of Operation Decisive Storm on the volume of anti-Shia tweets, the most commonly used Arabic hashtags in tweets containing anti-Shia keywords between February and August 2015 included: #SaudiArabia, #DecisiveStorm, #Yemen, #Iran, and #Houthis. For a sense of scale, #SaudiArabia was tweeted 1.4 million times, and the other hashtags appeared over 500,000 times each.

As fighter jets from Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Qatar, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates joined the Saudi-led operation in Yemen, a kind of pan-Sunni zeal swept through the region. Portraying opposition to the military intervention as a treasonous threat to national unity, many Sunni Arab leaders framed the conflict in starkly sectarian terms, as a war against all Shia connected to Iran’s “Safavid” empire, referring to one of the most powerful ruling dynasties of Persia that established Shia Islam as the state religion.²⁵ Houthi fighters in Yemen who belong to the Zaydi offshoot of Shia Islam may have little in common with the Alawite Shia in Syria or the Shia populations of Gulf countries that adhere to the most common Twelver sect of Islam. However, Gulf rulers and the Saudi state media in particular have continually fixated on the common thread of Shia Islam that loosely ties these groups to one another—as well as to Iran. By ignoring other local identities and strategic motivations that drive actions on the ground, rulers have worked to drum up support for the intervention in Yemen and to shore up national unity.²⁶

In the Gulf, support and opposition to the intervention developed along religious lines, and criticism of the intervention was punished harshly. In Saudi Arabia, Shia-led protests in the Eastern Province against military involvement in Yemen were crushed by security forces sent to confront “terrorist elements,” according to the Saudi Press Agency.²⁷ While Kuwait’s parliament voted overwhelmingly to join the air strikes, the nine lawmakers who opposed participation were all Shia.²⁸ After condemning the intervention on his Twitter account, Khaled al-Shatti, a prominent Kuwaiti lawyer and former member of parliament, was arrested on charges of challenging the emir, demoralizing Kuwaiti soldiers, offending the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and threatening Saudi relations with Kuwait.²⁹ Similarly, in Bahrain, Shia activists were arrested for criticizing participation in Operation Decisive Storm, including prominent opposition leader and human rights activist Nabeel Rajab who was charged with spreading “false news and malicious rumors,” as reported by the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, after tweeting critically about Bahrain’s involvement and sharing graphic photos of a burnt corpse and a child buried under rubble.³⁰

Although the Saudi government and its coalition partners officially justified the intervention as a means of fighting for “legitimacy,” “stability,” “unity,” and “security” in Yemen,³¹ and preventing a Houthi incursion into Saudi Arabia, from the first days of the conflict the Saudi religious establishment portrayed the intervention in vitriolic sectarian terms. On March 26, the kingdom’s highest religious authority authorized the military operation as a war to defend religion. The Council of Senior Religious Scholars issued a fatwa, pronouncing any soldiers killed in the fighting martyrs, stating, “One of the greatest ways to draw closer to God almighty is to defend the sanctity of religion and Muslims.”³² Taking to the Twittersphere, clerics did not shy away from spewing rancorous rhetoric depicting the conflict in Yemen as a religious holy war. This was illustrated by a series of tweets sent by Saudi Sheikh Naser al-Omar to his 1.8 million Twitter followers: “It is the responsibility of every Muslim to take part in the Islamic world’s battle to defeat the Safawis and their sins, and to prevent their corruption on earth.”³³ In a video posted on his Twitter account in the same period, he told dozens of Saudi men seated in a mosque that their “brothers” in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen were fighting a jihad, or holy war, against the “Safawis.”³⁴ Similarly, immediately following the intervention, Saudi cleric Abdulaziz Toufayfe derided the Shia tradition of visiting family burial sites, calling the Shia “people of idols, worshippers of graves” in a message that was retweeted over 12,000 times by April 8, 2015.³⁵

In this charged climate with both Sunni leaders and the clerical establishment endorsing hostile sectarian narratives, the volume of anti-Shia tweets skyrocketed. This rise in anti-Shia rhetoric mixed with wartime Saudi nationalism stoked fears among the region’s Shia minority. In Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, Shia residents became concerned that the intervention in Yemen had heightened suspicion of the kingdom’s Shia population and put increased pressure on King Salman to deal more harshly with future Shia unrest.³⁶

Anti-Sunni Spikes

Anti-Sunni tweets are significantly less common than those containing anti-Shia rhetoric in this data set (see figure 3). This is partly driven by the fact that the only keywords used to gather these tweets were Nasabi, Nawasib (those who hate the family of Muhammad, singular and plural), and Ummawi (Umayyad), in order to avoid drawing in large numbers of irrelevant and nonsectarian tweets. Additionally, anti-Sunni tweets are much more likely to come from Twitter accounts with relatively few followers—including those of Shia militia groups and their supporters—which simply do not have the audience devoted to clerics, Islamic State accounts, and other influential users that drive anti-Shia rhetoric. Moreover, given the relatively disadvantaged and often precarious minority status that the Shia face across the region, it is unsurprising that anti-Sunni rhetoric is less common.

In the six-month period under study, several spikes in the quantity of tweets containing anti-Sunni terms also appear to correspond to violent events on the ground, despite the relatively low volume of messages. While ongoing violence in Syria contributes to these fluctuations, many of the tweets sent in these periods of elevated anti-Sunni tweet volume reference sectarian violence in Iraq. This may be influenced by the much larger Shia population in Iraq relative to Syria, as well as the fact that fighting against the Islamic State in Iraq—particularly the role of Shia militias backed by the Iraqi government and Iran—received a great deal of media attention in this period.

Increases in the volume of anti-Sunni hate speech on Twitter appear to be driven by a combination of pan-Shia pride and fear. On the one hand, pan-Shia nationalism, in which Shia populations in the Gulf states feel emboldened by the political ascendance of Iraqi Shia and the success of Shia militias in fighting the Islamic State, is on the rise. Yet on the other hand, Shia in Sunni-dominated Gulf states feel threatened by and fear reprisals for the violence perpetrated by Shia across the region, whether it be in Iraq, Syria, or Yemen.

The first two spikes in the number of tweets occurred during the intensification of the Tikrit offensive led by the Iraqi army and Shia militias against the Islamic State in mid-March and their recapture of Tikrit in late March.³⁷ The Tikrit offensive was seen as revenge for the Islamic State’s massacre of 1,700 Shia soldiers at Camp Speicher in June 2014. Up to 30,000 pro-Iraqi government forces participated in the offensive, the majority of which belonged to Shia militia groups under the umbrella of the Popular Mobilization Forces.³⁸ Amid reports of atrocities carried out by Shia militia groups against Sunni civilians, it is unsurprising that the social media accounts of Shia militia groups were often peppered with violent sectarian rhetoric in this period.³⁹ Along these lines, an account affiliated with Ahul Bayt, a Shia Iraqi satellite channel, tweeted immediately following the buildup to the Tikrit offensive, “Oh Shia of Iraq, you defeated the Nawasib in Tikrit, so the Nawasib will take revenge on your brothers in Bahrain! Grant them victory over their enemies! #Free Tikrit.”⁴⁰ While most of the tweets appeared to focus on the recapturing of Tikrit by Iraqi government forces and Shia militias, the second spike also coincided with the predominantly Sunni Syrian rebels’ capture of a key Jordanian border crossing from Bashar al-Assad’s armed forces and Iran-backed Hezbollah fighters.⁴¹

The third large fluctuation followed clashes between the Islamic State and Shia militias in Ramadi, Iraq, in late April,^42<