CANBERRA: Australia’s Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has alled on the Iraqi government to “mock and disprove” Islamic State’s online propaganda more effectively and more quickly to help the US-led coalition in its war on terror. Speaking to an elite audience in Washington, ahead of his meeting with US President Barack Obama on Tuesday, Turnbull said Islamic State (IS, or ISIL) was winning the propaganda war with its sophisticated use of technology and social media, and that needed to be stopped. “ISIL may have an archaic and barbaric ideology but its use of technology and social media in particular is very sophisticated and agile,” Turnbull said in a statement released in Canberra on Tuesday. “As ISIL uses social media for its propaganda, we must respond rapidly and persuasively with the facts.” “It was clear to me from my recent visit, that the Iraqi government and other anti-ISIL forces are not reacting quickly enough to contradict ISIL’s online messages, which have been used both to recruit new fighters and demoralise those who oppose them and we should help them with this.” “ISIL claims must be mocked and disproved as soon as they are made … the cyber sphere demands reactions as rapid as the kinetic battlefield.” In his speech to the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, Turnbull also cautioned leaders against unwittingly aiding Islamic State by blaming Islam or all Muslims for the group’s actions or accepting IS’s own overblown rhetoric about its power and achievements. Such actions only served to further alienate Muslim communities in the west, and increase the likelihood that young men become IS sympathizers, even soldiers. “We should remember that terrorism is a strategy of the weak, deployed against the strong. We should not, as the president observed last week, allow … ISIL to lead us into exaggerating its power,” Turnbull said on Tuesday. “We should not be so delicate as to say ISIL and its ilk have ‘ got nothing to do with Islam’.” “But neither should we tag all Muslims or their religion with responsibility for the crimes of a tiny terrorist minority. This is precisely what the extremists want us to do.” “Today, they want us to turn on the Muslim communities in our midst because it reinforces their narrative to young Muslims that America or Australia does not want them, that they have no future here, that this is not their country too.” Turnbull told his Washington audience he had been heartened by recent discussions with Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo about this issue. “I have been heartened by my conversations with leaders of Muslim-majority nations who are promoting an authentic, modern and tolerant Islam,” he said. “As one said to me only a few days ago: ‘we must not allow these criminals to hijack our religion’.” “President Widodo, whose capital was attacked last week and with whom I spoke again on Friday, is a powerful advocate for moderate and tolerant Islam.” “He condemns the extremists not just for their violence, most of which, after all, is directed against other Muslims, but for the way they defame Islam, his faith.” Yet Turnbull said he remained confident coalition forces would soon regain control of the IS-dominated areas of Syria and Iraq, and the terror threat the extremist group poses around the world. “The coalition will win: by targeting ISIL militarily, using local ground forces supported by Coalition air power, weapons and training; curbing ISIL finances; stopping foreign fighter flows; and pursuing political resolution and reconciliation in Syria and Iraq,” Turnbull said. The key point of Turnbull’s visit to the U.S., the meeting with Barack Obama, will occur in the early hours of Wednesday Australian time.