Islamic State’s Al Bayan radio station back online

The Islamic State has announced the return of its radio station to the web after authorities deleted the previous domain. The station, Al Bayan, or “The Dispatch” broadcasts programming including hourly news bulletins, reports from correspondents in Syria and Iraq, interviews and music-less Nasheed,s or hymns, which have become synonymous with the terror group’s ghastly video releases. News broadcasts are presented in various languages, including Arabic, English, Turkish, French and Russian, in an attempt by ISIS to reach the widest potential audience. The Islamic State announced the radio station, another chink in its propaganda armor, back in early 2015. Originally airing on an FM frequency in Mosul, the station was soon rolled out to Raqqa, Syria and for a while even to Darnah and Benghazi, Libya. In 2015, The Washington Post described its programming as ‘eerily sounding like an NPR news program.’ Following the deletion of the previous website, ISIS returned to the web Friday with a fully updated portal, including options for high and low bandwidth playback and a link to a Firefox browser plugin to enable streamlined playback with the click of a button. Jihadis continue to evade domain takedowns by slightly changing the station’s URL upon return. Once a domain such as AlBayan.com has been deleted by authorities, ISIS typically inserts an extra character, for example ‘AlBayaaan’ or chooses a new domain suffix for the new portal.