May 5, 2004
By John R. Bradley. News Analysis
The Straits Times
THE Arabic-language website alsaha.com may not be well-known to the average Web surfer outside the Middle East.
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But, along with other online forums used by Islamic terror organisations to discuss strategy and exchange information, it has become essential reading for the CIA, FBI and other Western intelligence officers.
'The online activities of Al-Qaeda, Islamic and other terrorist groups are increasingly being monitored by counter-terrorism agencies, in the belief that they provide a kind of early warning system,' said Professor Shyam Tekwani at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University.
'The use of new media technologies by these groups is getting increasingly sophisticated and nuanced,' Prof Tekwani, an expert on the way terrorist organisations exploit the media, told The Straits Times.
Last week, the attacks against Westerners in Yanbu, Saudi Arabia, first broke on an Islamic website.
A week earlier, senior Al-Qaeda leader Abdul Aziz Al-Muqrin chose an Islamic website to issue his latest video statement, which warned of attacks on US cities.
And an audiotape attributed to alleged top Al-Qaeda operative Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi rejected on another Islamic site 'lies' concerning a planned chemical attack by the terror network in Jordan.
The Madrid train bombings in March, it was revealed, was being discussed four months earlier by Islamic militants on an Internet news group called Global Islamic Media.
The posting, which expressed the hope that the attacks would bring about a Socialist victory in the general election and the subsequent withdrawal of Spain's troops from Iraq, was reportedly picked up by Norwegian intelligence but not acted on.
Al-Qaeda's presence on Islamic websites became clearer to US officials after Sept 11.
A key discovery was that two days before the attacks, a message had appeared on the popular Dubai-based alsaha.com discussion forum proclaiming that 'in the next two days', a 'big surprise' would come from the Saudi Arabian region of Asir.
That remote province near Yemen was where most of the 19 hijackers came from.
The CIA and FBI have since been monitoring alsaha.com and other Islamic websites with increased vigilance and some security forces in Latin America and South-east Asia are tracing the local equivalents.
'New media technologies have been in use by terrorist groups from Peru to the Philippines to communicate and network for over a decade now,' said Prof Tekwani.
But he cautioned that while the instant exchange of information allowed by the Internet has given a window into the murky world of Al-Qaeda and its surrogates to intelligence officers, many South-east Asian governments have not yet fully grasped the consequences.
'Not all the governments in the region have been vigorous and pro-active in meeting this threat. Some do not even acknowledge it. The emphasis seems to be on 'hard power' as opposed to 'soft',' he added.
Equally worrying is that the more widely read Islamic sites become, the more they appear to be providing inspiration to far-right hate sites in the United States whose own links with terrorism are well-known.
The first known hate site inspired Timothy McVeigh to plot the bombing in Oklahoma in 1995. It still offers instructions on how to build a car bomb.
Now the anti-Semitic white supremacists of America's hinterland are forging links with Islamic extremists in Europe and perhaps the Middle East, said the US News & World Report.
Last week, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, which fights anti-Semitism and has been tracking hate websites for nearly a decade, told a conference on the rise of anti-Semitism in Berlin that it witnessed a surge in the number of US-based sites promoting terrorist recruitment and urging young people to join 'holy wars' and become suicide bombers. Such sites deny the Holocaust, theorise 9/11 conspiracies and glorify Al-Qaeda.
'The inspiration for all the violent anti-Jewish hate crimes in the United States in the last five years was the Internet. Ominously, this invective is also prevalent on many sites that are pro-Al-Qaeda,' said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre.
'All use various methods, including Yahoo clubs for teenagers, to transmit virtual libraries on how to train terrorists and carry out terrorist acts worldwide,' he told The Straits Times.
ON THE NET: Warning of attacks
# Two days before the 9/11 attacks, a message had appeared on the popular, Dubai-based alsaha.com discussion forum proclaiming that 'in the next two days', a 'big surprise' would come from the Saudi Arabian region of Asir.
# Al-Qaeda leader Al-Muqrin recently chose an Islamic website to issue his latest video warning of attacks on US cities.
http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/world/story/0,4386,249278,00.html