‘Terrorist recruiters’ versus ‘terrorist slayers’: Weaponizing Syria in Russian information warfare

This article focuses on Russian information warfare in the context of the Syrian civil war. From the beginning of its military intervention, Russia justified its presence in Syria by claiming to fight “international terrorism.” This article draws on corpus linguistic analyses to examine this claim by analyzing the linguistic anatomy of Russian information warfare on Twitter. Findings reveal how recurring linguistic patterns construct information tactics that condemn the United States as a “terrorist recruiter” and “civilian killer” and praise Russia as a “terrorist slayer” and a “humanitarian.” We compare these findings to open-source conflict data to discuss how these information tactics were related to kinetic maneuvers on the ground.