Making Sense of Jihad

Countering Conventional Wisdom

International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence's new report challenges the conventional wisdom on internet radicalization. 

Tim has full coverage of its release.

This CNet article gives you an idea of the report's primary thesis:

That's not to say that extremists don't ever use Web sites to reinforce their messages but that "self-radicalization and self-recruitment via the Internet with little or no relation to the outside world rarely happens, and there is no reason to suppose that this situation will change in the near future."

It also found that "much of the jihadist Web presence was about 'preaching to the choir'" and that "it is largely ineffective when it comes to drawing in new recruits."

After examining a variety of ways to block, filter, or remove offensive sites, the report found that "many of the filtering technologies that are currently in use are either too crude or too expensive to operate" and that they fail to deal with the conversational part of the Internet." Even though it may be possible to "remove, filter or hide content that is available from relatively static Web sites," such efforts will be largely ineffective when it comes to "chat rooms, instant messaging, virtual worlds and networking sites." Like the rest of us, it seems as if terrorists have discovered Web 2.0.

Around the Web

Rusty made me laugh with this one.  If you haunt and track jihadi websites, you'll already know that she's become a familiar face.

But Will made me laugh harder with his summary of Hesbah forum commentators' disbelief in the news that Gulbuddin Hekmatyar would cut a deal with the Americans:

Respondents doubt that someone of his stature, ideology, and ties to Bin Laden would cut a deal.

Ha hahhahaaa!

Meanwhile, in the real world, the lines between piracy in the Gulf of Aden, geopolitical chaos on the Horn of African, and AQ activity in Yemen are blurring by the week.  Armies of Liberation reports on AQ and piracy activities in both countries, including the seizure of a Turkish chemical tanker.  In the same post there's a squib that holds very ominous news for anyone with a sense of strategy:

A Somali Islamist militia seized a key port town Wednesday, giving it control of most of southern Somalia and sidelining the weak government. The capture of Merka, 56 miles from the capital, Mogadishu, means the hardline al-Shabab militia now holds both major ports with airstrips south of the capital.

So now AQ's group in Somalia has control of two port towns  This could give them a strategic advantage in the Gulf of Aden piracy operations too.  We may actually see an increase in piracy over the next year with an even greater portion of the loot going directly to AQ.

In related news, War is Boring reports on a "thousand-ship navy" in the Gulf of Aden.  Information Dissemination suggests that the situation is bad enough to effect Christmas-gift related imports from India:

I don't really know where to go with this, and I doubt the video game crowd in Europe has considerable political clout to influence policy anymore than what the EU is already doing, but it is interesting the shipping market is using the Santa Claus will be late this year angle to emphasize how frustrating piracy has become for them moving near the coast of Somalia.

Expect the Obama administration to take up the Aden issue early. 

An excerpt from "Islamic Responses to Europe at the Dawn of Colonialism."

A discussion on the eschatology of radical Islam.

Could Qaradawi's Shia problem (so ably reported at the Shack) have its source in a family psycho-drama? MEMRI hints.  Or is this just a little Persian love tap on the Sheikh?

Let's see:  there's a sword: check.  a book: check.  two rifles: double check. and those ever-present black flags: check.  I could have designed it better.

Another one?  Sigh.

I like OSINFO blog.  They often post excellent work in OSINT methodology, but this link chart is not one of them (it's like the Anti-Tufte).  But they redeem themselves with this post:

I've argued before that al-Qaeda's grand strategy uses terrorism in the service of a 'constructivist' mission:  spreading and deepening Islamic identity among Muslims, defining this Islamic identity in very specific salafi-jihadist terms against the competing definitions offered by other Islamist groups, and establishing that Islamic identity requires costly participation in a very specifically defined jihad.  

Note to Mr. Aardvark: it's called dawah.

Yeah, they were there, according to this report. I'm convinced that if we hadn't invaded Iraq and torn down that regime, we would have seen Saddam Hussein set up Afghan muj training central (with the usual complicity from the Iranians) in the heart of the Middle East.  He would have become AQ's best friend. If you take into consideration all the accounts of young men mobilizing in Pakistan in late 2001-02 to fight Americans in Afghanistan, add to it an active Iraq, and it may have been the case that we would have lost Afghanistan by now. 

Interesting links at Intelfusion related to Russia's pre-Georgia invasion prep (along with another one of those Anti-Tufte flow/link charts)

Around the Web

Nathan Field talks Hezbollah influence on the "rebranding" of al-Qaida: 

No political group has more respect on the streets of predominantly Sunni countries like Egypt than Hizbollah. In a 2008 Zogby Arab Public Opinion poll, 27 per cent of Arabs chose Hassan Nasrallah as their ideal leader – putting him in first place...Contrary to prevailing perceptions in the West, the Arabic media draws a sharp distinction between “resistance” and “terrorism”, with marked impact on the reputations of Hizbollah and al Qa’eda....Al Qa’eda, by contrast, are invariably dismissed as mere terrorists.

Will at Jihadica asks an important question about recruitment: "Are there examples of people who were motivated solely through the Internet and found associates and opportunities solely through the Internet?"

I have a short answer, and a shorter answer.  Latter first:  No.  Former: Because AQ's primary method of recruitment cannot be done effectively online alone.  There must be one-on-one contact.  If you're interested in a longer analysis of this phenomenon, pay me.

Primary Source of note:  "How to Kill a Crusader in the Arabian Peninsula" by Amer Al-Najd.

“Below I will explain the jihadist way of action and the security measures to be employed by the jihad fighter [when he wants to kill a Westerner]:

“First of all, before carrying out the operation, pray [to Allah] to guide you on the good path.

“[Regarding your] external appearance - Try as much as possible to look like someone who is not religious. For example, wear [a kuffiyeh] with an ‘aqal instead of a turban, and wear cheap dark glasses during the day and regular glasses at night. Your clothes must be long, and try if at all possible for them to be heel-length, or longer; don’t be afraid of this. Wear a sport suit or a regular suit. Similarly, it is greatly preferable to be shaven..."

After being over-hyped in the 1990s, cyberwarfare and cyberterrorism are finally coming of age.  Curiously, none of the recent examples of it including the downing of the AQ forums to the Sunni-Shiite media hackings (reported in yesterday's Washington Post) to the recent Russian attacks against Estonia and Georgia (being studied through Operation Gray Goose) are US-based or US-generated.  It's borderless warfare.

Meanwhile, a new report on emerging cyber threats appears at first glance to be mired in a law enforcement model that should have been discarded after Russia's attack on Estonia.  I wish we were sophisticated enough to make distinctions between different types of online activity, rather than just lumping it all together.  Threats to VoIP and state-directed DDOS attacks on key national infrastructure nodes are both important, but are fundamentally different threats.  However, the technological sophistication of our policy-makers is hindering our ability to get over the whole "wowy-Internet" thing and move on to a mature understanding of the cyber world.

Matt Armstrong at MountainRunner has an excellent post on our limited capabilities in the "Second War of Ideas:"

The U.S. is still not armed for the Second War of Ideas, a war we’re already 7-10 years into. To be effective, we need a Department of Non-State, functionally if not bureaucratically, armed with the appropriate tools and comprehensive collaboration across agencies and countries and organizations. But we also need a Department of State as traditional diplomacy is not obsolete.

AP reported last week that -- surprise!  AQ still has plenty of cash.  As I've said before, with trillions of dollars in surplus cash flowing out of the Gulf even .00001 percent of it directed toward AQ means a lot of jihad.

Post-modern confusion at CBS news:  thuggery is not torture. It's thuggery.

From the new issue of Orbis:  "Learning from Contemporary Conflicts to Prepare for Future War"

On Drucker, the IC and building intelligence analysts -- a glimpse into how the sausage is made.  Alternative version here.

Another new blog (via KOW):  The WSI Brussels Blog

Finally, Tim's nod to ZenPundit's "quantum library."  I know you're all dying to know so, very well, here's mine:

Egil's Saga (Sturlusson)

Heimskringla (Sturlusson)

Divine Comedy (Dante)

Parzival (Eschenbach)

Letters of JRR Tolkien

After Babel (Steiner)

A Distant Mirror (Tuchman)

From Dawn to Decadence (Barzun)

On Moral Fiction (Gardner)

The Autumn of the Middle Ages and Homo Ludens (Huizinga)

The Rise of Western Christendom (Brown)

The Barbarian Conversions (Fletcher)

Russia's Cyber War

Russia's recent use of cyber warfare against Georgia isn't jihad related, but the implications for global asymmetric warfare (AQ-related or not) won't be lost on most of you.  The recent distributed attacks against Estonia and Georgia deserve some real distributed OSINT analysis, and it looks like a new project is underway via IntelFusion.

Thanks to the ideas that Bob Gourley has recently expressed in his “Social Media and the National Security Professional” , and to industry contacts made via this blog and through Twitter, I’m both pleased and excited to announce the launch of a social network analysis of Russian cyber warfare activities.

This is a pure grass roots effort using only open source data pulled from the Web. All the participants are volunteers. Regular updates will be posted here, and our findings will be published in the appropriate venues.

Intelfusion, Zero Intel Agents and Aaron Mannes at CT Blog are  all contributing to a better OSINT understanding of what happened in Georgia's region of cyberspace. 

Cyberwar -- For real this time

There's been talk of cyberwar in DC circles for years, but there have been very few examples of it, and most of those have originated in the FSU.  Well, Russia's capabilities in the realm of cyberwar are apparently on full display.  Intelfusion has the scoop and the links on what it calls Russia's "full scale" parallel cyber-war targeting Georgia's internet infrastructure. For instance, this technical report (as of Sat), quoted in the post:

For those of a technical nature we show the latest server routing map (see diagram below) which clearly shows the Russian based servers AS12389 ROSTELECOM, AS8342 RTCOMM, and AS8359 COMSTAR, controlling all traffic to Georgia’s key servers. For example here AS28751 CAUCASUS NET AS Caucasus Network Tbilisi, Georgia & AS20771 DeltaNet Autonomous System DeltaNet ltd 0179 Tbilisi Georgia

Do Germans Care About the Threat?

I found a link to this Der Spiegel interview with an expert on Islam on an Islamist website yesterday.  Many of the muj posters were annoyed that a fellow Muslim would be reminding Westerners that they're doomed unless they wake up out of their leftist ideological stupor.   

SPIEGEL: Many Germans believe that communities should live together peacefully without any parallel societies. Is it therefore right to compromise in order to avoid antagonizing Muslims unnecessarily?

Tibi: Quite the opposite. The Islamic officials who live here are very intelligent and view this as weakness. Muslims stand by their religion entirely. It is a sort of religious absolutism. While Europeans have stopped defending the values of their civilization. They confuse tolerance with relativism.

SPIEGEL: When something insults Muslims, we often tend to just back off -- doesn't this help defuse the conflict?

Tibi: No. That is simply giving up. And the weaker the partner is viewed by the Muslims, then the greater the anger which they express. And this anger is often carefully staged. The argument over the cartoons for example was completely orchestrated. Nothing was spontaneous. A lot of people don't know if Denmark is a country or a cheese. Where did they get the Danish flags? Protests like these are weapons in this war of ideas. Or take another example: The president of the Iranian parliament was visiting Belgium where he had an appointment with a female Belgian colleague. He refused to shake her hand, so she didn't meet with him. He left Belgium and accused her of racism. The accusation of cultural insensitivity is a weapon. And we have to neutralize it.

SPIEGEL: Can the Islam conference which the German minister of domestic affairs, Wolfgang Schäuble, organized in Berlin last week, help in this regard?

Tibi: No, because the biggest taboo is that there even is a conflict at all. Everyone denies that. Instead people talk about misunderstandings and how these should be resolved. But a conflict of values is not a misunderstanding. Islamic orthodoxy and the German constitution are not compatible. And that is why the Islam conference failed.

Concerns and Inisghts on the Internet Jihad

The Internet is another front in the war on terror,  but it has received more publicity in recent months.  Jamestown Foundation recently published a report on the "electronic jihad."  It discusses a  jihad forum post that calls for "heightened electronic attacks against U.S. and allied government websites and provides information for  mujahid hackers."  The report goes on the summarize some of the information provided to the "mujahid hackers."

Cyberterrorism is a cause for concern, but it's often the case that e-jihad and cyberterrorism appears to be more intimidating  than it is, because few people have the skills needed to do any damage or defend against such attacks.    However, e-jihadists often use very basic techniques to use and abuse cyber technology.  The threat is significant, but it's not invulnerable to counter measures.

Since the Washington Post had its series on Al Qaeda's Internet presence, E-Qaeda, the webmaster at the counterterrorism website, Internet Haganah, offers his readers some perspective on AQ's e-capabilities:

There are only a handful of jihadis out there with code-writing skills, and many of them know just enough to get them and their buddies in trouble. It is, for example, questionable wisdom to use Visual Basic to develop an encryption program that is supposed to enable secure communications among jihadists. The software won't stand up to the likes of the NSA, and the fact that you even tried to develop or use it makes you a target.

To the extent that Islamists use Internet cafes, they are exposing themselves not only to online surveillance but also to good old-fashioned physical surveillance, since Internet cafes are by definition public places. These businesses have owners who may find it in their best interest to cooperate with law enforcement.

"The Internet is the ideal medium for terrorism today: anonymous but pervasive," RAND Corp. terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman said.

Pervasive, yes. Anonymous? Not nearly as anonymous as such statements suggest. To the extent that there is any anonymity on the Internet, this is something that can be exploited by those of us in the business of tracking down and taking out the bad guys. The bad guys are in a Catch-22: they want to hide while at the same time they want to share data and interact with their fellow jihadis.

They can't do both.

The good guys only need to hide the fact that they are investigators, agents, spies. They have a much better chance of succeeding, since the bad guys can only do so much to find out who someone really is. The bad guys cannot, for example, compel a service provider to hand over log files.

Ongoing Cyber War

The global war on terrorism has a side that receives little media attention.  It's an information war that pits national intelligence analysts, freelance experts, bloggers, "script kiddies," state-sponsored cyber warfare agents, and jihadi terrorists with a lot of time and cyber warfare skills.

Recently, a freelance expert named Jeremy Reynalds, who tracks US-based jihad websites, had his own website hacked:

Now [Reynalds'] web site has been hacked by individuals so proficient that the entire account has been wiped off the computer server on which it was housed.

“The simple fact is that these guys are not happy when I write articles exposing their hateful agenda,” he said. “Who else could it have been?”

“Our web host will launch an investigation on their own,” Reynalds added. “But ...these were not script kiddies (amateur hackers), they were pros. And they likely did not leave behind much for us to work with.”

Reynalds said while he cannot definitively say it was a terror attack against Joy Junction’s web site, he has a message for those individuals whom he dubbed “radical jihadi thugs” who engage in cyber crimes.