WASHINGTON – In the mountains near Jalalabad in November 2001, as the Taliban collapsed and al-Qaida lost its Afghan sanctuary, Osama bin Laden biographer Hamid Mir watched “every second al-Qaida member carrying a laptop computer along with a Kalashnikov” as they prepared to scatter into exile.
Nearly four years later, al-Qaida has become the first guerrilla movement in history to migrate from physical space to cyberspace. With laptops and DVDs, in secret hideouts and at Internet cafes, young code-writing jihadists have sought to replicate the training, communication, planning and preaching facilities they lost in Afghanistan with countless new locations on the Internet.
Al-Qaida suicide bombers and ambush units in Iraq routinely depend on the Web for training and tactical support. In Qatar, Egypt and Europe, cells affiliated with al-Qaida that have recently carried out or seriously planned bombings have relied heavily on the Internet.
Such cases have led Western intelligence agencies and terrorism specialists to conclude that the “global jihad movement,” sometimes led by al-Qaida fugitives but increasingly made up of diverse “groups and ad hoc cells,” has become a “Web-directed” phenomenon, as a presentation for U.S. government terrorism analysts by longtime State Department expert Dennis Pluchinsky put it. The government has proven ineffective at blocking or even hindering this vast online presence.
Among other things, al-Qaida and its offshoots are building a massive online library of training materials – some supported by experts who answer questions on message boards or in chat rooms. The training covers such subjects as how to mix ricin poison, how to make a bomb from commercial chemicals, how to pose as a fisherman and sneak through Syria into Iraq, how to shoot at a U.S. soldier, and how to navigate by the stars while running through a night-shrouded desert. These materials are cascading across the Web in Arabic, Urdu, Pashto and other first languages of jihadist volunteers.
The Saudi Arabian branch of al-Qaida launched an online magazine in 2004 that exhorted recruits to use the Internet: “Oh Mujahid brother, in order to join the great training camps you don’t have to travel to other lands,” declared Muaskar al-Battar, or Camp of the Sword. “Alone, in your home or with a group of your brothers, you too can begin to execute the training program.”
“Biological Weapons” was the stark title of a 15-page Arabic language document posted two months ago on the Web site of al-Qaida fugitive leader Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, one of the jihadist movement’s most important propagandists, often referred to by the nom de guerre Abu Musab Suri. His document described “how the pneumonic plague could be made into a biological weapon,” if a small supply of the virus could be acquired. Nasar’s guide drew on U.S. and Japanese biological weapons programs from the World War II era and showed “how to inject carrier animals, like rats, with the virus and how to extract microbes from infected blood … and how to dry them so that they can be used with an aerosol delivery system.”
Jihadists seek to overcome in cyberspace specific obstacles that they face from armies and police forces in the physical world. In planning attacks, operatives are often at risk when they congregate at a mosque or cross a border with false documents. They are safer working on the Web. Al-Qaida and its offshoots “have understood that both time and space have in many ways been conquered by the Internet,” said John Arquilla, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School who coined the term “netwar” more than a decade ago.
Al-Qaida’s innovation on the Web “erodes the ability of our security services to hit them when they’re most vulnerable, when they’re moving,” said Michael Scheuer, former chief of the CIA unit that tracked bin Laden. “It used to be they had to go to Sudan, they had to go to Yemen, they had to go to Afghanistan to train,” he said.
Now, even when such travel is necessary, an al-Qaida operative “no longer has to carry anything that’s incriminating. He doesn’t need his schematics, he doesn’t need his blueprints, he doesn’t need formulas.” Everything is posted on the Web or “can be sent ahead by encrypted Internet.”
The number of active jihadist-related Web sites has metastasized since Sept. 11, 2001. When Gabriel Weimann, a professor at the University of Haifa in Israel, began tracking terrorist-related Web sites eight years ago, he found 12; today, he tracks more than 4,500.
Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq more than two years ago, the Web’s growth as a jihadist meeting and training ground has accelerated. The war has become a clarion call for globally dispersed radicals. It has also led al-Qaida to place vast amounts of terrorist training material online to support its recruitment and fighting in the field.
The Web’s shapeless disregard for national boundaries and ethnic markers fits exactly with bin Laden’s original vision for al-Qaida, which he founded to stimulate revolt among the worldwide Muslim ummah, or community of believers. Bin Laden’s appeal among some Muslims has long flowed in part from his rare willingness among Arab leaders to surround himself with racially and ethnically diverse followers, to ignore ancient prejudices and national borders. In this sense of utopian ambition, the Web has become a gathering place for a rainbow coalition of jihadists.
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In Afghanistan, the Taliban banned television and even toothbrushes as forbidden modern innovations. Yet al-Qaida, led by educated and privileged gadget hounds, adapted early and enthusiastically to the technologies of globalization, and its volunteers managed to evade the Taliban’s screen-smashing technology police.
Bin Laden used some of the first satellite telephones while hiding out in Afghanistan. He produced propaganda videos with hand-held cameras long before the genre became commonplace.
Today, however, bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman Zawahiri, have fallen well behind their younger followers worldwide. The two still make speeches that must be recorded and couriered at considerable risk to al-Jazeera or other satellite stations, as with Zawahiri’s message broadcast last week. Their younger adherents have moved on to Web sites and the production of videos with shock appeal that can be distributed to millions instantly via the Internet.
Many online videos seek to replicate the Afghan training experience. An al-Qaida video library found on the Web showed in a series of high-quality training films shot in Afghanistan how to conduct a roadside assassination, raid a house, shoot a rocket-propelled grenade, blow up a car, attack a village, destroy a bridge and fire an SA-7 surface-to-air missile. During a practice hostage-taking, the filmmakers chuckled as trainees herded hostages into a room, screaming in English, “Move! Move!”
One of al-Qaida’s current Internet organizations, the Global Islamic Media Front, is now posting “a lot of training materials that we’ve been able to verify were used in Afghanistan,” said Rebecca Givner-Forbes, of the Terrorism Research Center. One recent online manual instructed how to extract explosive materials from missiles and land mines. Another offered a list of “explosive materials available in Western markets,” including France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the former Soviet Union and Britain.
These sites have converted sections of the Web into “an open university for jihad,” said Reuven Paz, who heads the Project for the Research of Islamist Movements in Israel.
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Al-Qaida’s main communications vehicle after Sept. 11 was Alneda.com, a clearinghouse for statements from bin Laden’s leadership group as his grip on Afghan territory crumbled. An archive of the site includes a library of pictures from the 2001 Afghan war, along with a collage of news accounts, long theological justifications for jihad, and celebrations of the Sept. 11 hijackers.
The Webmaster and chief propagandist of the site has been identified by analysts as Yusuf Ayiri, a Saudi cleric and onetime al-Qaida instructor in Afghanistan. In the summer of 2002, authorities, chased him across multiple computer servers. At one point, a pornographer gained control of the Alneda.com domain name, and the site shifted to servers in Malaysia, then Texas, then Michigan. Ayiri died in a battle with Saudi security forces in 2003. His site disappeared.
Rather than one successor, there were hundreds.
Realizing that fixed Internet sites had become too vulnerable, al-Qaida turned to rapidly proliferating jihadist bulletin boards and Internet sites that offered free upload services where files could be stored. The outside attacks on sites like Alneda.com “forced the evolution of how jihadists are using the Internet to a more anonymous, more protected, more nomadic presence,” said Ben Venzke, a U.S. government consultant whose firm IntelCenter monitors the sites. “The groups gave up on set sites and posted messages on discussion boards – the perfect synergy. Now they post announcements on discussion boards and link to 20 or 30 download sites. The beauty of it is, there’s no one fixed site to go after.”
One of the best-known forums that emerged after Sept. 11 was Qalah, or Fortress. Registered in Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates, the site has been hosted in the U.S. by a Houston Internet provider, Everyone’s Internet, that has also hosted a number of sites preaching radical Islam.
On Qalah, a potential al-Qaida recruit could find links to the latest in computer hacking techniques (in the discussion group called “electronic jihad”), the most recent beheading video from Iraq and long Koranic justifications of suicide attacks. Sawt al-Jihad, the online magazine of al-Qaida in Saudi Arabia, was available, as were long lists of “martyrs” who had died fighting in Iraq. The forum abruptly shut down on July 7, hours after a posting asserted responsibility for the London transit bombings that day in the name of the previously unknown Secret Organization of al-Qaida in Europe.
Until recently, al-Qaida’s use of the Web appeared to be centered on communications: preaching, recruitment and broad incitement. But there is increasing evidence that al-Qaida and its offshoots are also using the Internet for tactical purposes, especially for training adherents.
“If you want to conduct an attack, you will find what you need on the Internet,” said Rita Katz, director of the SITE Institute, a group that monitors and tracks jihadist Internet sites.
Jarret Brachman, director of research at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, said he recently found on the Internet a 1,300-page treatise by Nasar, the Spanish- and English-speaking al-Qaida leader who has long trained operatives in poison techniques. The book urged a campaign of media “resistance” waged on the Internet and implored young prospective fighters to study computers along with the Koran so they could use the Internet to foster a “culture of preparation” with training programs.
The movement has also innovated with great creativity to protect its most secret communications. Khalid Sheik Mohammed, a key planner of the Sept. 11 attacks later arrested in Pakistan, used what researchers familiar with the technique called an electronic or virtual “dead drop” on the Web to avoid having his e-mails intercepted by eavesdroppers in the United States or allied governments. Mohammed or his operatives would open an account on a free, public e-mail service such as Hotmail, write a message in draft form, save it as a draft, then transmit the e-mail account name and password during chatter on a relatively secure message board, according to these researchers.
The intended recipient could then open the e-mail account and read the draft – since no e-mail message was sent, there was a reduced risk of interception.
Al-Qaida’s success with such tactics has underscored the difficulty of gathering intelligence against the movement. Mohammed’s e-mails, once found, “were the best actionable intelligence in the whole war” against bin Laden and his adherents, said Arquilla, the Naval Postgraduate School professor. But al-Qaida has been keenly aware of its electronic pursuers at the National Security Agency and elsewhere and has tried to do what it can to stay ahead.
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