By Steve Coll and Susan B. Glasser
Washington Post Staff
Writers
Sunday, August 7, 2005; A01
In the snow-draped mountains near Jalalabad in November 2001, as the Taliban
collapsed and al Qaeda lost its Afghan sanctuary, Osama bin Laden biographer
Hamid Mir watched "every second al Qaeda member carrying a laptop computer along
with a Kalashnikov" as they prepared to scatter into hiding and exile. On the
screens were photographs of Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta. Nearly four years later, al Qaeda has become the first guerrilla movement in
history to migrate from physical space to cyberspace. With laptops and DVDs, in
secret hideouts and at neighborhood 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 Qaeda suicide bombers and ambush units in Iraq routinely depend on the Web
for training and tactical support, relying on the Internet's anonymity and
flexibility to operate with near impunity in cyberspace. In Qatar, Egypt and
Europe, cells affiliated with al Qaeda that have recently carried out or
seriously planned bombings have relied heavily on the Internet. Such cases have led Western intelligence agencies and outside terrorism
specialists to conclude that the "global jihad movement," sometimes led by al
Qaeda 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.
Hampered by the nature of the Internet itself, the government has proven
ineffective at blocking or even hindering significantly this vast online
presence. Among other things, al Qaeda and its offshoots are building a massive and
dynamic online library of training materials -- some supported by experts who
answer questions on message boards or in chat rooms -- covering such varied
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 Qaeda launched an online magazine in 2004 that
exhorted potential 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 the inaugural issue of 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 Qaeda 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, according to a
translation by Rebecca Givner-Forbes, an analyst at the Terrorism Research
Center, an Arlington firm with U.S. government clients. 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 they face from
armies and police forces in the physical world. In planning attacks, radical
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 Qaeda 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 Qaeda'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 added. Now, even when such travel is necessary, an al Qaeda
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, and
it gets lost in the billions of messages that are out there." 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. Hundreds of them celebrate al Qaeda or its
ideas, he said. "They are all linked indirectly through association of belief, belonging to
some community. The Internet is the network that connects them all," Weimann
said. "You can see the virtual community come alive." Apart from its ideology and clandestine nature, the jihadist cyberworld is
little different in structure from digital communities of role-playing gamers,
eBay coin collectors or disease sufferers. Through continuous online contact,
such communities bind dispersed individuals with intense beliefs who might never
have met one another in the past. Along with radical jihad, the Internet also
has enabled the flow of powerful ideas and inspiration in many other directions,
such as encouraging democratic movements and creating vast new commercial
markets. 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. But al Qaeda's move into cyberspace is far from total. Physical sanctuaries
or unmolested spaces in Sunni Muslim-dominated areas of Iraq, in ungoverned
tribal territories of Pakistan, in the southern Philippines, Africa and Europe
still play important roles. Most violent al Qaeda-related attacks -- even in the
most recent period of heavy jihadist Web use -- appear to involve leaders or
volunteers with some traditional training camp or radical mosque
backgrounds. But the Web's growing centrality in al Qaeda-related operations and
incitement has led such analysts as former CIA deputy director John E.
McLaughlin to describe the movement as primarily driven today by "ideology and
the Internet." The Web's shapeless disregard for national boundaries and ethnic markers fits
exactly with bin Laden's original vision for al Qaeda, 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. It offers al Qaeda "a virtual sanctuary" on a
global scale, Rand Corp. terrorism specialist Bruce Hoffman said. "The Internet
is the ideal medium for terrorism today: anonymous but pervasive." In Afghanistan, the Taliban banned television and even toothbrushes as
forbidden modern innovations. Yet al Qaeda, led by educated and privileged
gadget hounds, adapted early and enthusiastically to the technologies of
globalization, and its Arab volunteers managed to evade the Taliban's
screen-smashing technology police. Bin Laden used some of the first commercial satellite telephones while hiding
out in Afghanistan. He produced propaganda videos with hand-held cameras long
before the genre became commonplace. Bin Laden's sons played computer games in
their compound in Jalalabad, recalled the journalist Abdel Bari Atwan, who
interviewed bin Laden late in 1996. 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 in a makeshift studio 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 short 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
Qaeda video library discovered on the Web and obtained by The Washington Post
from an experienced researcher 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 men and women into a room, screaming in
English, "Move! Move!" One of al Qaeda'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 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 country-by-country 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. "The main audience are the younger generation in the Arab
world" who now can peruse at their own pace "one big madrassa on the
Internet." Al Qaeda's main communications vehicle after Sept. 11 was Alneda.com, a
clearinghouse for new statements from bin Laden's leadership group as his grip
on Afghan territory crumbled. An archive of the site, also obtained by The Post
from the researcher, 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
Western analysts as Yusuf Ayiri, a Saudi cleric and onetime al Qaeda instructor
in Afghanistan. In the summer of 2002, U.S. authorities and volunteer
campaigners who were trying to shut him down 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 gun battle with Saudi security forces in May 2003. His site
ultimately disappeared. Rather than one successor, there were hundreds. Realizing that fixed Internet sites had become too vulnerable, al Qaeda and
its affiliates 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 N. 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. One of the best-known
forums that emerged after Sept. 11 was Qalah, or Fortress. Registered to an
address 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. Researchers who follow the site believe
it may be connected to Saad Faqih, a leading Saudi dissident living in exile in
Britain. They note that the same contact information is given for his
acknowledged Web site and Qalah. Faqih has denied any link. On Qalah, a potential al Qaeda 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 paeans to the Sept. 11 hijackers
and long Koranic justifications of suicide attacks. Sawt al-Jihad, the online
magazine of al Qaeda 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 Qaeda
in Europe. Until recently, al Qaeda's use of the Web appeared to be centered on
communications: preaching, recruitment, community-building and broad incitement.
But there is increasing evidence that al Qaeda and its offshoots are also using
the Internet for tactical purposes, especially for training new 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
the 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 Qaeda 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. The Nasar book was posted anonymously on the hijacked server of a U.S.
business, a tactic typical of online jihadist propagandists, whose webmasters
steal space from vulnerable servers worldwide and hop from Web address to Web
address to evade the campaigners against al Qaeda who seek to shut down their
sites. 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 four 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,
the researchers said. Matt Devost, president of the Terrorism Research Center, who has done
research in the field for a decade, recalled that "silverbullet" was one of the
passwords Mohammed reportedly used in this period. Sending fake streams of
e-mail spam to disguise a single targeted message is another innovation used by
jihadist communicators, specialists said. Al Qaeda's success with such tactics has underscored the difficulty of
gathering intelligence against the movement. Mohammed's e-mails, once
discovered, "were the best actionable intelligence in the whole war" against bin
Laden and his adherents, said Arquilla, the Naval Postgraduate School professor.
But al Qaeda has been keenly aware of its electronic pursuers and has tried to
do what it can to stay ahead -- mostly by using encryption. In the last two years, a small number of cases have emerged in which jihadist
cells appear to have formed among like-minded strangers who met online,
according to intelligence officials and terrorism specialists. And there are
many other cases in which bonds formed in the physical world have been sustained
and nurtured by the Internet, according to specialists in and outside of
government. For example, Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers burst into the Ottawa
home of Mohammed Momin Khawaja, a 24-year-old computer programmer, on March 29,
2004, arresting him for alleged complicity in what Canadian and British
authorities described as a transatlantic plot to bomb targets in London and
Canada. Khawaja, a contractor with Canada's Foreign Ministry, met his alleged
British counterparts online and came to the attention of authorities only when
he traveled to Britain and walked into a surveillance operation being conducted
by British special police, according to two Western sources familiar with the
case. British prosecutors alleged in court that Khawaja met with his online
acquaintances in an Internet cafe in London, where he showed them images of
explosive devices found on the Web and told them how to detonate bombs using
cell phones. The first person jailed under a strict new Canadian anti-terrorism
law passed after Sept. 11, Khawaja is not scheduled to have a preliminary
hearing on his case until January. The transit attacks in London may also have an Internet connection, according
to several analysts. They appear to be successful examples of "al Qaeda's
assiduous effort to cultivate and train professional insurgents and urban
warfare specialists via the Internet," wrote Scheuer, the former CIA
analyst. In a posting not long after the London attacks, a member of one of the al
Qaeda-linked online forums asked how to take action himself. A cell of two or
three people is better, replied another member in an exchange translated by the
SITE Institute. Even better than that is a "virtual cell, an agreement between a
group of brothers over the Internet." It is "safe," extolled the anonymous
poster, and "nobody will know the identity of each other in the beginning." Once
"harmony and mutual trust" are established, training conducted and videos
watched, then "you can meet in reality and execute some operation in the
field." Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
