There’s an excellent Guardian article here about the evolution of online jihad, which I largely agree with. One of the interesting issues relates, as I understand it, to the fact that participation in “on line” jihad, suffices in religious terms. So even what might be ineffectual posting and physically passive contributions get a a tick in the box against the question “have I done jihad today?”. As the article says “Most of these individuals craved blood on their computer monitors, but few were willing to shed it themselves”. Radical terrorist postings by Anwar al-Awlaki and the online magazine “Inspire” and the infamous “Making bombs in the kitchen of your Mom” get a lot of political attention, but the result is often pathetic most of the time. We shouldn’t ignore it and shouldn’t stop trying to stop the one in the million who actually puts his money/blood where his mouth is. But we need also to recognise it is about one in a million. Inspire hasn’t created hordes of radical Islamist terrorists driving their trucks into crowds as it hoped to do. In truth it was a pretty ropey old publication, by comparison to most media available today and it’s already defunct.
And yet, and yet….. We have seen significant evolutions in the the jihadi space on-line. One thing we can be certain of is that it is dynamic and will continue to evolve. I sense that serious effort is underway copying the activities of “Anonymous” for all the obvious reasons, but with jihadi motivation rather than for the lulz. Things are changing and faster then we might expect and much faster than our political masters can comprehend. The constituency remains radical in thought if not deed and they may have an appetite for cyber damage that wasn’t seen in terms of physical violence. IT savvy terrorists in their own bedrooms, hunched over a computer screen launching cyber attacks (God I hate that phrase) rather than hunched over a mix of acetone and peroxide perhaps pose a bigger threat.
Maybe with the Al Qaida leadership just a small number of heartbeats away from extinction, tomorrow’s jihadi terrorist will draw his tactics from Anonymous. Lets face it, Anonymous provide a better paradigm in organisational terms then Al Qaida do right now. Please note I’m not calling Anonymous a terrorist group, all I’m suggesting is that terrorist groups and individuals will note the way it operates, and its potential and take what it can from the concept.
UPDATE: Seems the FBI have been considering the same thing. See here.
Good article RD, as you can imagine I have some comments of my own.
Where do you think the next logical step for the modern armchair/bedroom jihadist may be then if they are becoming defunct? While I agree the potency of people like Awlaki is declining in cyber and real life circles (especially given the widespread gossiping of his credibility being less than great anyway), if he didnt have a willing and in some cases able, audience to distribute to, why other than for sabre rattling reasons would he bother.
Furthermore, are we really that certain that the AQ machine is about to come to a halt given its new method of regional franchises, Yemen, Egypt, Somalia etc.
Inspire is such a contradiction in terms as it failed to do exactly that, it started with the huge propaganda victory of the US servicemen who attcked their own side with small arms at Fort Hood etc, and set out with the potential to flourish, but for whatever reason, as you quite rightly said withered away. As for ‘Bombs in the kitchen of your Mom’ this is a cheap alternative to dated publications both you and I know well and in the past have correctly taken seriously.
I do agree with your comments regarding anonymous, I do and always have thought that the biggest threats come from ‘lone wolf’ ( i hate that phrase) style self-radicalized, hard to spot, predict and deter.
Not sure why I have replied to this post other than to bolster my interest in this issue further and to also thank you for your detailed and informative post.
Stay well
Graham
I don’t think the bedroom jihadis are becoming defunct. I think they will adopt the tactics of anonymous and fight on line rather than in the streets. As for the regional franchises- Yemen is battered. Egypt for now is solely focused on Egypt and becoming credible in elections. Somalia isn’t really engaging online for now. (Is that true?). I sense AQIM religious fervour in North Africa is getting mixed up with more earthly secular matters – I certainly see less international leadership from them on line than the historical AQ core.
There are some well-documented cases of forum members travelling to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Chechnya to join militant groups. For example in 2010 the Shamikh forum (which probably the top of the Jihadi on-line community) and three other high level forums announced that a popular member, Al-Baraa al-jaza’iri, had had travelled to Afghanistan for jihad. The Shamikh forum used this as an opportunity to list seven other members who had been killed in jihadist theatres.
The most high-profile attack carried out by a Shamikh forum member was that by Abu Dujanah al-Khorasani. Abu Dujanah was the Jordanian double-agent who killed CIA officers in the suicide attack in Khost in December 2009. Previously he had been a ‘writer’ on Shamikh.
But this is a very small proportion of the overall number of on-line Islamists (as of this morning Shamikh alone had 17,021 members).
There is certainly a growing interest on these forums in hacking and other offensive cyber activity. Anonymous manuals are being posted and recently an ideologue posted saying that the Electronic Jihadi was as important the mujahedeen fighter. To date there has been only one well known jihadi cyber attack (sorry Roger), the Here You Have worm released by the Brigades of Tariq ibn Ziyad in 2010. However forum members appear to be inspired (forgive the pun) by Ox-Omar, a.k.a ‘Saudi Hacker’ who claimed responsibility for the attack on El AL last month. He is more pro-Palestinian rather than AQ and used techniques more associated with criminal activity (stealing credit card details) than extremism.