article_snippet.sent: The kind of horror represented by the Blackwater case and others like it -- from Abu Ghraib to the massacre at Haditha to CIA waterboarding -- may be largely absent from public memory in the West these days, but it is being used by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) to support Syria (ISIS) sectarian narrative.
article_snippet.sent: In Syria (ISIS) propaganda, ISIS has been using Abu Ghraib and other cases of Western abuse to legitimize Syria (ISIS) current actions in Iraq as the latest episodes in over a decade of constant "Sunni resistance" to "American aggression" and to "Shiite betrayal"—as phrased in an ISIS publication from late 2014 titled "The Revived Caliphate," which chronicles the rise of ISIS since 2003.
article_snippet.sent: In "The Revived Caliphate," Abu Ghraib is invoked three times as the place where Iraqi Sunnis who resisted The U.S.
article_snippet.sent: The publication first recounts attacks on Abu Ghraib at the height of the American intervention by al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI)  -- ISIS predecessor -- to free imprisoned "Sunnis" who had been detained by the Americans.
article_snippet.sent: The publication then links those two stories to the storming of the prison by ISIS in 2013 to free those who had been tortured by "the Americans and Shi'a" (as The publication puts it) over ten years.
article_snippet.sent: The reproduced images of Abu Ghraib prisoners in the aforementioned ISIS publication, juxtaposed with images of civilian deaths as a result of U.S. airstrikes against ISIS targets, are presented as "proof" of the group's narrative.
article_snippet.sent: And the group are reinforced with text that frames America today as "the air force of the Shi'a.