January 16, 2008
Internet is the new al Qaeda Training Camp
A sobering study by Evan Kohlmann to be published tomorrow by West Point's Combating Terrorism Center shows how jihadi forums are being used to recruit new members for terrorist organizations. We've long noted the centrality of the web for the distribution of propaganda, and have often noted it is key for recruitment, but the study actually documents cases where Muslims are recruited over the internet for actual jihad operations.
One case is a Sudanese man named Zaman al-Rahman, whose web nickname was Zaman al-Hawan, or era of Shame. He first started writing on the Muntada al-Ansar forum in April 2004. By November of that year, he stopped posting and in March 2005 the site published eulogies to him, claiming he had killed himself in the second battle for Falluja.Other cases that we've documented include Daniel "Al-Jughaifi" Maldonado, from Houston, who was a moderator at an Islamist forum and who was eventually convinced that it was his duty to travel to Somalia to fight for Islamist rebels with links to al Qaeda. Maldonado now sits in federal prison.
"In the same way that traditional terrorist training camps once served as beacons for would-be jihadists, online support forums such as Muntada al-Ansar and al-Ekhlaas now operate as black holes in cyberspace, drawing in and indoctrinating sympathetic recruits, teaching them basic military skills and providing a web of social contacts that bridges directly into the ranks of Al Qaeda," [Evan] writes. "Rather than simply using the web as a weapon to destroy the infrastructure of their enemies, Al Qaeda is using it instead as a logistical tool to revolutionize the process of terrorist enlistment and training."The article then notes that Rudy Giuliani is the only candidate to take notice of the online terrorism phenomenon.A senior editor at the Combating Terrorism Center, Erich Marquardt, yesterday said Mr. Kohlmann's paper discloses the connection between what might be called arm chair jihadists in cyberspace and the actual members of Al Qaeda. "There has always been a question as to whether forum participants are merely arm chair enthusiasts or actual jihadist linked fighters," Mr. Marquardt said. "Not only are these people deciding to pick up arms after spending time on the forums, you also have hard-core Qaeda operatives who are participating in the forums."
