Statement from Azzam.Com Regarding Closure of its Web-Site

first web-site dedicated to Jihad and Mujahideen news and information. Allah has enabled us, with meagre resources and little technological experience, to provide information on the Mujahideen and to provide daily news and interviews from the Jihad in Chechnya (from September 1999 to August 2001) and the Jihad in Afghanistan from November 2001 until today.

A great deal of effort and sacrifice goes into providing a single news bulletin and those involved in the news process put themselves at risk from either the missiles or the prying eyes of unfriendly authorities. The last six years have seen at least two or our correspondents killed, who provided news and information from the World's hot spots so that the rest of the World could be kept informed as to what was happening 'on the other side'. The first of these was Masood Al-Benini, from Benin, who was martyred in Chechnya in April 2000 whilst attempting to leave the country after receiving a serious shrapnel injury to his thigh. His vehicle was ambushed by the Russians at a checkpoint and he fought to defend himself until he was killed - may Allah accept him as a martyr. The second of these was Suraqah Al-Andalusi, who was martyred by an American cluster bomb in the Battle for Tora Bora in Eastern Afghanistan, December 2001, whilst providing news and information about the events in Afghanistan. The biographies of both of these individuals have been previously posted on our web-site.

Therefore, our web-site also, has not been spared damage. We have had to change through a number of servers and hosting companies over the years in order to keep the site open. In the times when the site has been shut, we have been emailing out news bulletins to keep the World informed. The purpose of this statement is to clarify the chronology of events leading to the closure of our web-site and what we perceive to be the future of our site.

After the events of 11 September 2001, our site was shut down after the American hosting company received numerous emails from viewers upset at the attacks. The hosting company informed us that they had to remove our site for 'Terms of Service' (TOS) violations. A few weeks later, our site reappeared on the servers of a Muslim hosting company in Canada, who also duly shut the site down, after receiving a written order from the local law enforcement authorities. No reason was given in the order, but the Muslim company still shut down the site without contesting it.

Also after 11 September, a group of Zionist Jews surfaced on the Internet, led by a British individual who goes by the pen-name of Johnathan R. Galt. He set-up a web-site titled 'Islamic Terror Sites on the Web' at http://www.geocities.com/johnathanrgalt and an email address, johnathanrgalt@yahoo.co.uk. Both addresses are still functional at the time this statement goes to press. Mr Galt organised a collective, concerted campaign, to have a number of Islamic web-sites shut down, by complaining to and putting emotional pressure on the hosting and service-providing companies. Mr Galt slandered our site as labelling it, Al-Qaida's Azzam.Com and this label was enough to convince many companies to remove our site. A search for 'Johnathan Galt' ('Johnathan' spelt with two 'h's) on Google returns a number of pro-Jewish web-sites where Mr Galt has posted his appeals.

Sometime in November 2001, our web-site was transferred to hosting companies in South-East Asia and we began to provide daily, uninterrupted news on the events in Afghanistan. The site continued to remain online until July 2002. During this time, whilst tracking the continuing efforts of Mr Galt, we realised, as we thought at first, that the FBI was ensuring that our site remained online, even though officials at the US State Department cited concern over our site, in news reports that were carried by major news organisations. A number of discussion boards specific to web hosting companies, e.g. webhostingtalk.com, revealed threads stating that companies wanted to shut down service to the web-hosting companies hosting our sites, but they were specifically instructed by the FBI that 'this site must remain open at any cost'. We concluded that US Intelligence wanted our site to remain open for two reasons:

(i) To use it for gathering intelligence on events happening on the ground in Afghanistan and perhaps that our news bulletins might lead them to capture 'Mujahideen suspects'.

(ii) To gather intelligence on the infrastructure behind the site. Mr Galt and Co., apparently not convinced of the 'benefits' of the FBI's strategy, continued to pressurise both the FBI and the web hosting companies, to remove our web-site, and this tit-for-tat saga continued until July this year. In June and July 2002, American forces in Afghanistan took heavy casualties and many of the incidents in which these casualties occurred, were being daily reported by us. By the end of July 2002, the Americans concluded that there was no useful intelligence to be gleaned from leaving our site open and they decided that enough was enough. During the South-East Asian 'Anti-Terrorism' Summit in July, Secretary of State Colin Powell's delegation personally delivered a written order to the local authorities asking them to immediately shut down our site. Our site has remained shut since then, but we have continued to post daily news bulletins on other web-sites, such as Waaqiah.com.

As for the future, we predict the following to happen so we are informing our viewers in advance of what to expect:

(a) The American authorities will attempt to take control of our domain, azzam.com, and use it in their 'War Against Terror/Islam' in order to provide false propaganda. It will be easy to spot fake sites because we will email other, established web-sites and organisations such as Waaqiah.com or Maktabah.net, and inform them of which site is genuine and which site is not.

(b) The authorities will create new 'Jihadi' web-sites in order to 'steal the show'. Some characteristics of these sites will be:

(c) The Zionist web groups will continue their campaigns to shut down Islamic web-sites until Muslims begin doing the same and start complaining to web hosting companies of inflammatory Zionist web-sites, such as http://freeman.io.com, etc.

(d) The authorities will sponsor further 'Boycott Azzam' campaigns amongst the Muslims, similar to the 'Boycott Azzam' campaign that was launched by a Doctor from the 'Islamic Society of Britain' (ISB) in Birmingham, UK, in Ramadan/November 2001, complete with leaflets and radio announcements. There will also be more articles and statements made against our site by 'Muslims', with a view to put the Muslims off our site.

(e) Our site will continue to go online and offline until more Muslim Internet Service Providers appear who are prepared to legally challenge any attempts made to shut down our site.

We conclude by informing our viewers that our unedited news postings are posted throughout various Muslim discussion boards and an Islamic web-site by the name of Waaqiah.com has also been posting our daily, unedited news bulletins. The best support that our viewers can give us is to disseminate our news bulletins as widely as possible, counteract anti-Azzam campaigns,set up new web-sites that mirror and archive our content, and visit our site when it returns. As for our own web-site, Allah willing, we hope to have a new site up and running shortly, in which we ourselves would have modified the content so that the news and articles will remain the same, but there is nothing on the site that can be deemed illegal or 'inflammatory'. Please continue to check back at our site every few days and spread the news round when it is back online.

Finally, we would like to thank both our Muslim and non-Muslim viewers for their support over the last six years.

Azzam Publications
24 September 2002

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