Replies

Maybe they aren't quite as sophisticated as we give them credit for.

02:00 AM Aug. 06, 2003 PT

WASHINGTON -- With the Taliban out of Afghanistan and governments around the world restricting access to al-Qaida-linked websites, would-be militant Islamic holy warriors are turning to low-tech electronic message boards to find out where to fight.
The message boards, hosted by such domains as Yahoo and Lycos UK, are proving a free, unrestricted and largely difficult-to-track forum for would-be fighters to hook up with those coordinating operations, say terrorism experts and intelligence officials. Whereas once Islamic militants needed to pass through training camps in Afghanistan to be groomed for jihad, now they are announcing their desire to fight in Muslim holy wars and martyr attacks from cybercafes and home computers in Malaysia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Kingdom.
On June 6, 2003, Abu Thur, a computer programmer in Malaysia, posted a message to the Arabic-language "himmame" message board, hosted by Lycos in the United Kingdom. Lycos UK is partially owned by TerraLycos, the parent company of Wired News. (Groups that monitor these sites to track activities of Islamic militants asked that the URLs not be published).

"Dear Brothers,

I have already succeeded with the grace of Allah and his help, to go to Kurdistan for Jihad through one of the brothers in this forum.
Praise be to Allah, I have fought there, by the grace of God and his bounty. But Martyrdom was not granted to me, and therefore I ask Allah to give me more lifetime and to make my deeds good.
I ask anyone who has the capacity to organize for me to go to another Jihad front to correspond with me."
Four days before, Asad Allah, an Egyptian based in Malaysia, posted a similar message to the "Jihad Echo" message board, asking for help from forum members in hooking up with fellow fighters. "I told myself that if I am already here (in Malaysia), I might as well fulfill my Jihad, far away from the Egyptian authorities," he wrote. But "I failed to contact or get to know someone who might help me with fulfilling Jihad here. Should I go back?" to Egypt, he asks.

The SITE Institute, a private, Washington, D.C.-based group that tracks Arabic-language terror groups' use of the Web, has noticed a proliferation of message boards used by Islamic extremists. The acronym SITE stands for the Search for International Terrorist Entities.
"It's not only the message boards, but it's the number of message boards, that's alarming," said Rita Katz, director of the SITE Institute. "If there was one a year ago on two or three websites, today there are literally hundreds of them. And they are very dangerous. They are very important for delivering al-Qaida's communications. And there are more and more of them every day. I started giving up trying to keep track of them all."
Of course, the use of the Internet by Islamic militants is not news. What is new and interesting about their activity on message boards, experts say, is it shows their migration to lower-tech, largely text-only, more anonymous services, as they have had to adapt to some countries' -- like Egypt's -- attempts to block websites with known links to militant and terrorist groups, including al-Qaida and Egyptian Islamic Jihad.
"Many times, we close down the websites of al-Qaida, but in the coming days we have message boards opening on many new sites," Katz said. "Now we see them using PalTalk," an Internet phone service that is very difficult to trace, as well as Yahoo groups and message boards.
U.S. counterterrorism officials monitor a large number of message boards. But they admit they are overwhelmed trying to keep up with the evolution of al-Qaida's Internet tactics.
"It's hard to get a handle on," said one U.S. counterterrorism official who requested that his name not be used. "The number of militants who have cut their teeth in Afghanistan and places like Bosnia and Chechnya is so huge. Al-Qaida's problem is not lack of trained personnel, but the lack of central coordination. And these message boards … give them a basically anonymous command-and-control
tool."
Added former CIA operative Robert Baer, "The problem is, the whole movement is morphing from day to day. Before Iraq, it was all based in places like Afghanistan and Lebanon, and now all of a sudden, we have a holy war in Iraq, so the battlefield is changing every day and so do the people."
The messages on the boards offer an illuminating view into the world of Islamic militants worldwide, who use the boards for locating jihad and praising attacks the way others might use such services to find a date or discuss Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
For instance, after the May 12 suicide bombing of an expatriate housing facility in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, that killed 29 people, the SITE Institute's Katz noted supporters of the attackers flooding the message boards to offer praise of the attacks.
"I ask from kind Allah that he will forgive Yusuf al-Airy and will accept him as part of the devoted Martyrs, and will rest him in peace in his paradise above," posted someone -- who goes by the e-mail name almezane -- on a Saudi portal, Alsahat, on June 2. Al-Airy, one of the alleged Riyadh bombing planners, was killed in a shootout with Saudi authorities May 31.
"When I read these boards, it's very distressing," Katz said. "The level of hatred towards Americans … is very high."
A former U.S. intelligence official says there is another lesson to take from the proliferation of message boards used by terror groups.
"If you just try to think of all ways people can communicate and try to search them all, it's an impossible task," said the official, who asked not to be identified.
"That means we have to have a lot more in-depth capabilities than just searching the Web," the official added. "We have to start with some real information. It would be helpful to know who the people are, and perhaps have someone who knows them reveal them on a daily basis."

http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,59897,00.html