This report examines how al-Qaeda and the Islamic State frame Shia actors and Iran in their propaganda, challenging the assumption that sectarian hostility functions as a constant and uniformly central feature of jihadist discourse. Drawing on data from the TITAN Project, it maps the relative visibility, distribution, and framing of Shia-related narratives across official audiovisual outputs between 2020 and 2025, providing a baseline for assessing how these patterns may evolve during the current conflict involving Iran.
By combining quantitative corpus analysis with qualitative examination of language and framing, the study identifies a clear divergence between the two organizations. For the Islamic State, sectarianism operates as a core organizing principle: Shia communities and Iran occupy a central position within a dense and operationalized enemy architecture. Al-Qaeda, by contrast, exhibits a markedly different profile, in which references to Shia actors remain limited, conditional, and subordinated to broader strategic priorities. Iran emerges as a key point of differentiation: while ISIS embeds it within a consistent sectarian narrative, al-Qaeda maintains a posture of strategic ambiguity shaped by both ideological and operational constraints. Overall, sectarianism appears not as a constant, but as a selectively activated dimension of jihadist propaganda, embedded within distinct organizational logics.