US Central Command leaflet: 'Daesh Recruiting Office' meat-grinder cartoon, dropped over Raqqa (Syria, March 2015)
A dark cartoon of a tunnel where a queue of young men in ordinary clothes waits beneath a sign pointing to the 'Daesh Recruiting Office'. A masked fighter cranks a large meat grinder labelled with the group's name while a recruit's legs are fed in, and blood and mince pour out into a basket. The tell is the staged outcome, enlistment shown as being ground up, offered to potential recruits with the only remedy implied by the picture itself: do not join.
Propaganda techniques used in this leaflet
- Date
- March 2015
- Period
- Contemporary
- Made by
- US Central Command (leaflet released by CENTCOM; dropped by coalition aircraft)
Full record
Region, Country, Medium, Issuer type, Regime, Leader, Audience, Purpose, Theme, Event, Source, Rights
- Region
- North America
- Country
- United States
- Medium
- Leaflet
- Issuer type
- Military
- Regime
- Obama Administration
- Leader
- Barack Obama
- Audience
- Enemy civilians
- Purpose
- Warn or inform
- Theme
- War and the military
- Event
- Syrian Civil War
- Source
- Identified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they are
- Source
- Wikimedia Commons (US Central Command release), retrieved October 12, 2026
- Rights
- Public domain (US government work, US Central Command release), per Commons file page
US Central Command, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Text on the object
Original (Arabic) · read from the image, not independently checked
مكتب داعش للتوظيف [legend on the grinder:] داعش [sign at upper right:] [illegible]
Daesh Recruiting Office [legend on the grinder:] Daesh [sign at upper right:] [illegible]
The upper-left sign matches the Commons caption ('Daesh Recruiting Office'). The small red sign at upper right is too small at 500 px to read.
