A senior U.S. commander in Afghanistan apologized Wednesday for propaganda leaflets that superimposed a key Islamic text on the image of a dog. The leaflets distributed by U.S. forces in Parwan province, north of Kabul, on Tuesday depicted a lion, representing the U.S.-led coalition, chasing a dog with a section of the Taliban’s banner, containing a passage from the Koran in Arabic, superimposed on its side.

YouTube says it will redirect people searching for "violent extremist propaganda" and offer them videos that denounce terrorism. People searching for certain terms relating to the so-called Islamic State group will be offered playlists of videos "debunking its mythology".

Denmark’s foreign ministry says it is increasing its humanitarian aid to Iraq after the country’s security forces regained the city of Mosul. [...] “The liberation of Mosul shows that what the coalition is doing is working. Isis has lost its symbolic ‘capital’. The fight has been long and hard and has unfortunately brought with it great civilian losses and left ruins in Mosul as a result of Isis’ gruesome and barbaric actions,” Foreign Minister Anders Samuelsen said in the statement.

To fight terrorist propaganda on the Internet, social media companies, such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube have all instituted take down policies and teamed up with Microsoft to create a database of unique ‘fingerprints’ to automatically detect terrorist propaganda in the form of images and videos. [...] Despite these efforts, however, ISIS still continues to successfully disseminate its propaganda on the internet.

An innovative partnership between the leading private media group in the Middle East and top television writers and showrunners from the United States is taking a different approach: tackling the war of narratives. It might sound strange, or even frivolous, in the midst of an all-out war against the Islamic State in both Syria and Iraq. But, in fact, it makes perfect sense, given the cultural, ideological nature of the larger battle against extremism.

Many people of the region today believe that the ISIS communication approach is so slick, so technological, so modern that it cannot be the work of jihadists recruited in the hinterlands of poor Muslim countries alone. There is surely something big and sophisticated behind it, with an objective in mind: kick Islamism where it hurts the most: religious credibility.