Doing graphic design for ISIS was the passion of a 28-year-old Houston man who was arrested last week, according to a legal filing by the Department of Justice.
Anas Said was arrested last week in a chaotic scene in Houston after allegedly telling an undercover FBI agent that he wanted to conduct an “operation like 9/11.” But the legal filing contains a few incredibly interesting passages about ISIS’s propaganda workflow in Said’s alleged communication with an ISIS designer nicknamed “The Nightmare.”
According to the filing, which was first reported by our friends at Court Watch, Said was an aspiring ISIS graphic designer who was working with ISIS’s second-in-command graphic designer. That person told Said that ISIS’s chief designer gave him the nickname The Nightmare because of the extensive notes and revisions that were required before any piece of propaganda he worked on was pushed out. The DOJ document suggested that The Nightmare himself had many revisions for Said’s graphic design work.
“You can call me the Dawlawi [ISIS] designer or you can call me as the brother used to before. He used to send his designs for me to modify and because of the many changes, he used to be scared of me so he would call me ‘the nightmare,’” a message from The Nightmare to Said published by the DOJ said.
Between December 2023 and February 2024, Said worked on five ISIS propaganda videos and two images, which were the result of “extensive feedback and instruction” and “numerous rounds of edits,” which Said claimed in messages were “time- and labor intensive.”
The FBI wrote in a footnote that Said’s browser history “included numerous searches related to various video and image editing programs, templates, sound and light effects, animations, images, and gifs,” but did not say what tutorials he was allegedly using.
The FBI obtained what it says are notes on one propaganda image allegedly created by Said and which The Nightmare tore apart because it had so many design elements that it was not very legible or effective as a piece of propaganda, and suggested that Said should both simplify it and add blood effects to parts of it to better get the point across. Here is the original image that The Nightmare gave notes on:
“Look at these elements,” the Nightmare wrote. “Not every one of them needs to appear completely in the design, but you can put them in the front and back to back of each other. This way you will reduce the dimension of the design and make it more professional. That way the logo of the dawlah [ISIS] can be hidden completely behind the design because it is not as important as the title above. Also the world map, it can appear behind the two brothers and in front of it the explosion but with less transparency, it does not need to remain fully visible. Also the pictures of the coffins, you don’t have to make them fully visible, but it is enough to show a small part of them where the viewer can understand that they pertain to funerals.”
The DOJ said that The Nightmare and Said exchanged several messages about this design and, eventually, The Nightmare said “The text on the top needs effects as well … shining … blood spots or a line surrounding it, etc.”
They eventually settled on these revisions to the poster, which the FBI believes is about a January 3 bombing in Kerman, Iran. In this image, a mushroom cloud has been removed and a world map has been moved down to make text more legible, and images of coffins have been made smaller and have been added a filmstrip clipart template. The design is slightly cleaner overall, and black boxes have been added behind text to make it more legible.
The DOJ claims that Said also worked on several videos, and that he apparently made graphics for a video that included statistics about how many people were killed in specific attacks:
ISIS’s propaganda videos and graphics have been infamous since the rise of the terror organization. Said’s notes about the long hours and demanding nature of graphic design are reminiscent of complaints from some Taliban bureaucrats, who said after that they hated office work and longed for the days of Jihad after seizing control of Afghanistan.
