Cognetics and the Virtual Ummah

Fully appreciating the revolutionary nature of the Cognetic Age requires understanding that unrestrained human-to-human communication is at the heart of the current revolution. -Snop




Inside Qaeda's 'MySpace' Internet Sites

By Eli Lake Staff Reporter of the Sun
January 15, 2008

WASHINGTON — Al Qaeda-operated Web forums are bringing young men into the terrorist movement, including some who are turning into suicide bombers in Iraq, says a new paper for the American military's think tank on the war against Islamic terrorism.

The paper will be released Thursday in the monthly journal, Sentinel, of West Point's Combating Terrorism Center. It delves into what its author, Evan Kohlmann, calls Al Qaeda's "MySpace," the jihadi Web forums that have in some ways overtaken the role of Qaeda's physical training camps.

The paper examines Al Qaeda's first user-participatory Web forum, developed in 2004, known as Muntada al-Ansar, and it traces through the posts and subsequent eulogies on the site, how aspiring jihadis not only joined Al Qaeda, but traveled thousands of miles to detonate themselves in the battle of Iraq.

[...]

Mr. Kohlmann, who has worked as a consultant on terrorism for both the American and British governments, concludes that the Web forums for Al Qaeda in many ways replace the training camps the organization used to create terrorists in the 1990s.

"In the same way that traditional terrorist training camps once served as beacons for would-be jihadists, online support forums such as Muntada al-Ansar and al-Ekhlaas now operate as black holes in cyberspace, drawing in and indoctrinating sympathetic recruits, teaching them basic military skills and providing a web of social contacts that bridges directly into the ranks of Al Qaeda," he writes. "Rather than simply using the web as a weapon to destroy the infrastructure of their enemies, Al Qaeda is using it instead as a logistical tool to revolutionize the process of terrorist enlistment and training."

[...]

Mr. Kohlmann said yesterday in an interview, "Heretofore, the discussion has been limited because we want to get information about Al Qaeda that we never had. The kind of inside information, maybe there has not been an explicit awareness as long as we leave these Web sites online." But Mr. Kohlmann said the web forums were an immediate threat that must be aggressively countered.

"These are the new dark rooms where guys are planning trips and operations," Mr. Kohlmann said. "This is where people are teaching themselves to be terrorists online. It used to be you went to Afghanistan and this whole process took months and you had to travel thousands of miles.

What Al Qaeda has done is to simplify and franchise out the process, so that now someone can teach themselves to be a terrorist and can literally find their own way to the front line much more quickly."

(Full article)


Snop's Commentary:

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Social network analysis is gaining currency amongst counter-terrorism experts. One such expert is Dr. Marc Sageman, a former Foreign Service officer and practicing forensic psychiatrist.

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Dr. Sagemen describes the Internet’s impact on creating a virtual social network of like minded individuals that dream of recreating the 7th century Islamic Ummah (community or nation) and are willing to turn themsleves into human bombs to achieve their goal.

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From his book "Understanding Terror Networks"...

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"The Internet creates a seemingly concrete bond between the individual and the virtual Muslim community. This virtual community plays the same role that “imagined communities” played in the development of the feeling of nationalism, which made people love and die or their nations as well as hate and kill for them (Anderson 1991). Because of its virtual nature, the Internet community has no earthly counterpart and becomes idealized in the minds of surfers.

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This community is just, egalitarian, full of opportunity, unified in an Islam purged of national peculiarities, and devoid of corruption, exploitation, and persecution. The appeal of this approximation of paradise can become irresistible, especially to alienated young Muslims and potential converts suffering from isolation or from ordinary discrimination.

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The immediate responsiveness of Muslim chat rooms and the relevance of the message bring concreteness and reality to this virtual community. Without the restraints from real interactions with the social world, this virtual world allows extreme violence against the presumed conspirators against the virtual umma[h].”

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To get an idea of what a social network analysis looks like, take a look at the following analysis of the 911 hijackers. Just click here or on the graphic at the beginning of the article to see how the various groups were related.