Italian Paper Examines Al-Qa’Idah’s Use of Internet

Text of report by Italian leading privately-owned centre-right daily Corriere della Sera website, on 10 June

[Report by Gianni Santucci: "School of Terrorism Online: Combat Manuals, Forums, Videos"]

“This programme is still fine, they don’t know where you’re navigating from, or who you are…” It was 11 May last year, shortly after 2000. Kamel and a friend were at their computers. DIGOS [General Investigations and Special Operations Division] monitored their conversation. “When I went on the Al-Qa’idah website,” Kamel said, “they have a programme that conceals visitors to the website. It’s translated into Arabic.” The other man said, as he looked at his screen, “look, it says, click here if you don’t want to be monitored.”

The investigation into Kamel is still under way (which is why we have not used his real name.) Police monitoring and analyses of his computer described the virtual jihad outpost that the subject of the inquiry created in the lounge of his home. Kamel processed 20,000 documents a week – combat manuals, martyrs’ wills, Islamist forums. He examined the documents repeatedly, showed them to his friends, involved his young children.

This was a school in subversion on the Internet – run from an Italian city, but linked to Baghdad, Kabul, and Algiers. Nobody can yet say how many jihad outposts there arein anonymous rooms in Europe, the Orient, or the United States, or at what rate they are multiplying. This is Al-Qa’idah’s virtual and elusive entrenchment.

Global madrasa

To begin with, it was a job for couriers. Starting with Bin Laden’s first message after the attack on the Towers: recorded on a video cassette, entrusted to a succession of intermediaries, and eventually conveyed to journalists of the Arabic satellite television channels. This is what happened just seven years ago, but it already seems like prehistory.

The new Al-Qa’idah has abandoned couriers and has evolved by making full use of the Internet – a “powerful, swift, universal, and accessible” medium, a vehicle for “virtual connections that can become real.” This is the process analysed by Corriere della Sera journalist Guido Olimpio in his book to be published by BUR tomorrow. Its title is “Al-Qa’idah.com” [alQaeda.com].

The first website of Bin Laden’s organization, “Al Neda,” was launched in the early 1990s. Today the Islamist galaxy has between 6,000 and 7,000 websites. Israeli experts calculate that 900 of them are opened every year. They produce and reproduce audio and video on attacks, threats, ambushes, guerrilla warfare, instructions for manufacturing weapons, celebrations of martyrs. The label that manages the video and audio files of the most prominent leaders, “As Sahab,” now produces a video every three days. Their quality is improving all the time.

From a letter by Bin Laden to Mullah Omar, intercepted by the Americans in Afghanistan: 90 per cent of the battle will take place in the propaganda field. The Internet is a medium that provides the best guarantees. It is an ideological umbrella for those who will put the teachings into practice, albeit without direct contacts. A meeting place for militants and a forum for seeking recruits. A non- centralized university for indoctrination. A vehicle of “counterinformation” vis-A -vis the Western media. A means of launching threats and keeping the West in a state of constant anxiety. A forum for celebrity martyrs (there are over 3,000 books by jihadists online,) and on the operational plane Islamist hackers gather funds by means of Web scams.

The Internet is a mirror of the new Al-Qa’idah – amorphous, fragmented, and without any fixed hierarchy. The connections between the circulation of ideology and actions are variable. But on 7 April 2005 Hasan Ahmad blew himself up in a Cairo street. He had found instructions for manufacturing bombs on the Internet, followed the teachings of minor ideologues via the Web, and consulted forums devoted to the jihad. Every connection to the Al-Qa’idah galaxy was purely virtual, but four people died.

Al-Qa’idah “broadcasting”

In June 2007 the US forces broke into an apartment in Samara. They found 65 hard drives, 18 USB memory sticks, 500 CD-ROMs, and 12 computer stations. According to the Army spokesman, “it was a fully- fledged media centre. It was as operational as a television studio.” It is the media front of international terrorism. It produces, then uses short-lived channels (servers scattered in very remote parts of the vote) to broadcast its material.

In Austria last March a nucleus of activists was dismantled broadcasting videos of the Iraqi guerrillas. They called themselves the “Global Islamic Media Front” and had managed to produce television newsreels, with a newsreader sitting in the studio. Olimpio says, in “alQaeda.com”: “the watchword of this system is decentralization. A few individuals can create a trademark, and their container is then filled by associates. The propaganda network is a flexible phenomenon, capable of functioning without hierarchies. It is a mirror of the movement itself.”

The most famous trademark is “As Sahab,” the cloud. It conduct propaganda for both Al-Qa’idah and the Taleban. It announces on the Internet the broadcast of Usamah Bin-Ladin’s videos and then puts them on the Web. On 16 December it invited supporters and journalists to submit questions to Ayman al-Zawahiri, who replied a few weeks later. It gave its latest display of sophistication and quality 27 January 2008, by broadcasting “Winds of Paradise,” part two. It a documentary using animation, overdubbed voices, and shots from various angles, all designed to win recruits and to exalt the martyrs. Within the space of a few seconds it had spread across the Internet, hosted by 426 video websites.

Originally published by Corriere della Sera website, Milan, in Italian 10 Jun 08.

(c) 2008 BBC Monitoring European. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.