e-QAEDA | From Afghanistan to the Internet

Terrorists Turn to the Web as Base of Operations

By Steve Coll and Susan B. Glasser Washington Post Staff Writers

Sunday, August 7, 2005; A01

In the snow-draped mountains near Jalalabad in November 2001, as the Taliban collapsed and al Qaeda lost its Afghan sanctuary, Osama bin Laden biographer Hamid Mir watched "every second al Qaeda member carrying a laptop computer along with a Kalashnikov" as they prepared to scatter into hiding and exile. On the screens were photographs of Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta.

Nearly four years later, al Qaeda has become the first guerrilla movement in history to migrate from physical space to cyberspace. With laptops and DVDs, in secret hideouts and at neighborhood Internet cafes, young code-writing jihadists have sought to replicate the training, communication, planning and preaching facilities they lost in Afghanistan with countless new locations on the Internet.

Al Qaeda suicide bombers and ambush units in Iraq routinely depend on the Web for training and tactical support, relying on the Internet's anonymity and flexibility to operate with near impunity in cyberspace. In Qatar, Egypt and Europe, cells affiliated with al Qaeda that have recently carried out or seriously planned bombings have relied heavily on the Internet.

Such cases have led Western intelligence agencies and outside terrorism specialists to conclude that the "global jihad movement," sometimes led by al Qaeda fugitives but increasingly made up of diverse "groups and ad hoc cells," has become a "Web-directed" phenomenon, as a presentation for U.S. government terrorism analysts by longtime State Department expert Dennis Pluchinsky put it. Hampered by the nature of the Internet itself, the government has proven ineffective at blocking or even hindering significantly this vast online presence.

Among other things, al Qaeda and its offshoots are building a massive and dynamic online library of training materials -- some supported by experts who answer questions on message boards or in chat rooms -- covering such varied subjects as how to mix ricin poison, how to make a bomb from commercial chemicals, how to pose as a fisherman and sneak through Syria into Iraq, how to shoot at a U.S. soldier, and how to navigate by the stars while running through a night-shrouded desert. These materials are cascading across the Web in Arabic, Urdu, Pashto and other first languages of jihadist volunteers.

The Saudi Arabian branch of al Qaeda launched an online magazine in 2004 that exhorted potential recruits to use the Internet: "Oh Mujahid brother, in order to join the great training camps you don't have to travel to other lands," declared the inaugural issue of Muaskar al-Battar, or Camp of the Sword. "Alone, in your home or with a group of your brothers, you too can begin to execute the training program."

"Biological Weapons" was the stark title of a 15-page Arabic language document posted two months ago on the Web site of al Qaeda fugitive leader Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, one of the jihadist movement's most important propagandists, often referred to by the nom de guerre Abu Musab Suri. His document described "how the pneumonic plague could be made into a biological weapon," if a small supply of the virus could be acquired, according to a translation by Rebecca Givner-Forbes, an analyst at the Terrorism Research Center, an Arlington firm with U.S. government clients. Nasar's guide drew on U.S. and Japanese biological weapons programs from the World War II era and showed "how to inject carrier animals, like rats, with the virus and how to extract microbes from infected blood . . . and how to dry them so that they can be used with an aerosol delivery system."

Jihadists seek to overcome in cyberspace specific obstacles they face from armies and police forces in the physical world. In planning attacks, radical operatives are often at risk when they congregate at a mosque or cross a border with false documents. They are safer working on the Web. Al Qaeda and its offshoots "have understood that both time and space have in many ways been conquered by the Internet," said John Arquilla, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School who coined the term "netwar" more than a decade ago.

Al Qaeda's innovation on the Web "erodes the ability of our security services to hit them when they're most vulnerable, when they're moving," said Michael Scheuer, former chief of the CIA unit that tracked bin Laden. "It used to be they had to go to Sudan, they had to go to Yemen, they had to go to Afghanistan to train," he added.

Now, even when such travel is necessary, an al Qaeda operative "no longer has to carry anything that's incriminating. He doesn't need his schematics, he doesn't need his blueprints, he doesn't need formulas." Everything is posted on the Web or "can be sent ahead by encrypted Internet, and it gets lost in the billions of messages that are out there."

The number of active jihadist-related Web sites has metastasized since Sept. 11, 2001. When Gabriel Weimann, a professor at the University of Haifa in Israel, began tracking terrorist-related Web sites eight years ago, he found 12; today, he tracks more than 4,500. Hundreds of them celebrate al Qaeda or its ideas, he said.

"They are all linked indirectly through association of belief, belonging to some community. The Internet is the network that connects them all," Weimann said. "You can see the virtual community come alive."

Apart from its ideology and clandestine nature, the jihadist cyberworld is little different in structure from digital communities of role-playing gamers, eBay coin collectors or disease sufferers. Through continuous online contact, such communities bind dispersed individuals with intense beliefs who might never have met one another in the past. Along with radical jihad, the Internet also has enabled the flow of powerful ideas and inspiration in many other directions, such as encouraging democratic movements and creating vast new commercial markets.

Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq more than two years ago, the Web's growth as a jihadist meeting and training ground has accelerated.

But al Qaeda's move into cyberspace is far from total. Physical sanctuaries or unmolested spaces in Sunni Muslim-dominated areas of Iraq, in ungoverned tribal territories of Pakistan, in the southern Philippines, Africa and Europe still play important roles. Most violent al Qaeda-related attacks -- even in the most recent period of heavy jihadist Web use -- appear to involve leaders or volunteers with some traditional training camp or radical mosque backgrounds.

But the Web's growing centrality in al Qaeda-related operations and incitement has led such analysts as former CIA deputy director John E. McLaughlin to describe the movement as primarily driven today by "ideology and the Internet."

The Web's shapeless disregard for national boundaries and ethnic markers fits exactly with bin Laden's original vision for al Qaeda, which he founded to stimulate revolt among the worldwide Muslim ummah , or community of believers. Bin Laden's appeal among some Muslims has long flowed in part from his rare willingness among Arab leaders to surround himself with racially and ethnically diverse followers, to ignore ancient prejudices and national borders. In this sense of utopian ambition, the Web has become a gathering place for a rainbow coalition of jihadists. It offers al Qaeda "a virtual sanctuary" on a global scale, Rand Corp. terrorism specialist Bruce Hoffman said. "The Internet is the ideal medium for terrorism today: anonymous but pervasive."

In Afghanistan, the Taliban banned television and even toothbrushes as forbidden modern innovations. Yet al Qaeda, led by educated and privileged gadget hounds, adapted early and enthusiastically to the technologies of globalization, and its Arab volunteers managed to evade the Taliban's screen-smashing technology police.

Bin Laden used some of the first commercial satellite telephones while hiding out in Afghanistan. He produced propaganda videos with hand-held cameras long before the genre became commonplace. Bin Laden's sons played computer games in their compound in Jalalabad, recalled the journalist Abdel Bari Atwan, who interviewed bin Laden late in 1996.

Today, however, bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman Zawahiri, have fallen well behind their younger followers worldwide. The two still make speeches that must be recorded in a makeshift studio and couriered at considerable risk to al-Jazeera or other satellite stations, as with Zawahiri's message broadcast last week. Their younger adherents have moved on to Web sites and the production of short videos with shock appeal that can be distributed to millions instantly via the Internet.

Many online videos seek to replicate the Afghan training experience. An al Qaeda video library discovered on the Web and obtained by The Washington Post from an experienced researcher showed in a series of high-quality training films shot in Afghanistan how to conduct a roadside assassination, raid a house, shoot a rocket-propelled grenade, blow up a car, attack a village, destroy a bridge and fire an SA-7 surface-to-air missile.

During a practice hostage-taking, the filmmakers chuckled as trainees herded men and women into a room, screaming in English, "Move! Move!"

One of al Qaeda's current Internet organizations, the Global Islamic Media Front, is now posting "a lot of training materials that we've been able to verify were used in Afghanistan," said Givner-Forbes, of the Terrorism Research Center. One recent online manual instructed how to extract explosive materials from missiles and land mines. Another offered a country-by-country list of "explosive materials available in Western markets," including France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the former Soviet Union and Britain.

These sites have converted sections of the Web into "an open university for jihad," said Reuven Paz, who heads the Project for the Research of Islamist Movements in Israel. "The main audience are the younger generation in the Arab world" who now can peruse at their own pace "one big madrassa on the Internet."

From One Site to Many

Al Qaeda's main communications vehicle after Sept. 11 was Alneda.com, a clearinghouse for new statements from bin Laden's leadership group as his grip on Afghan territory crumbled. An archive of the site, also obtained by The Post from the researcher, includes a library of pictures from the 2001 Afghan war, along with a collage of news accounts, long theological justifications for jihad, and celebrations of the Sept. 11 hijackers.

The webmaster and chief propagandist of the site has been identified by Western analysts as Yusuf Ayiri, a Saudi cleric and onetime al Qaeda instructor in Afghanistan. In the summer of 2002, U.S. authorities and volunteer campaigners who were trying to shut him down chased him across multiple computer servers. At one point, a pornographer gained control of the Alneda.com domain name, and the site shifted to servers in Malaysia, then Texas, then Michigan. Ayiri died in a gun battle with Saudi security forces in May 2003. His site ultimately disappeared.

Rather than one successor, there were hundreds.

Realizing that fixed Internet sites had become too vulnerable, al Qaeda and its affiliates turned to rapidly proliferating jihadist bulletin boards and Internet sites that offered free upload services where files could be stored. The outside attacks on sites like Alneda.com "forced the evolution of how jihadists are using the Internet to a more anonymous, more protected, more nomadic presence," said Ben N. Venzke, a U.S. government consultant whose firm IntelCenter monitors the sites. "The groups gave up on set sites and posted messages on discussion boards -- the perfect synergy. One of the best-known forums that emerged after Sept. 11 was Qalah, or Fortress. Registered to an address in Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates, the site has been hosted in the U.S. by a Houston Internet provider, Everyone's Internet, that has also hosted a number of sites preaching radical Islam. Researchers who follow the site believe it may be connected to Saad Faqih, a leading Saudi dissident living in exile in Britain. They note that the same contact information is given for his acknowledged Web site and Qalah. Faqih has denied any link.

On Qalah, a potential al Qaeda recruit could find links to the latest in computer hacking techniques (in the discussion group called "electronic jihad"), the most recent beheading video from Iraq, and paeans to the Sept. 11 hijackers and long Koranic justifications of suicide attacks. Sawt al-Jihad, the online magazine of al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia, was available, as were long lists of "martyrs" who had died fighting in Iraq. The forum abruptly shut down on July 7, hours after a posting asserted responsibility for the London transit bombings that day in the name of the previously unknown Secret Organization of al Qaeda in Europe.

Until recently, al Qaeda's use of the Web appeared to be centered on communications: preaching, recruitment, community-building and broad incitement. But there is increasing evidence that al Qaeda and its offshoots are also using the Internet for tactical purposes, especially for training new adherents. "If you want to conduct an attack, you will find what you need on the Internet," said Rita Katz, director of the SITE Institute, a group that monitors and tracks the jihadist Internet sites.

Jarret Brachman, director of research at West Point's Combating Terrorism Center, said he recently found on the Internet a 1,300-page treatise by Nasar, the Spanish- and English-speaking al Qaeda leader who has long trained operatives in poison techniques. The book urged a campaign of media "resistance" waged on the Internet and implored young prospective fighters to study computers along with the Koran.

The Nasar book was posted anonymously on the hijacked server of a U.S. business, a tactic typical of online jihadist propagandists, whose webmasters steal space from vulnerable servers worldwide and hop from Web address to Web address to evade the campaigners against al Qaeda who seek to shut down their sites.

The movement has also innovated with great creativity to protect its most secret communications. Khalid Sheik Mohammed, a key planner of the Sept. 11 attacks later arrested in Pakistan, used what four researchers familiar with the technique called an electronic or virtual "dead drop" on the Web to avoid having his e-mails intercepted by eavesdroppers in the United States or allied governments. Mohammed or his operatives would open an account on a free, public e-mail service such as Hotmail, write a message in draft form, save it as a draft, then transmit the e-mail account name and password during chatter on a relatively secure message board, according to these researchers.

The intended recipient could then open the e-mail account and read the draft -- since no e-mail message was sent, there was a reduced risk of interception, the researchers said.

Matt Devost, president of the Terrorism Research Center, who has done research in the field for a decade, recalled that "silverbullet" was one of the passwords Mohammed reportedly used in this period. Sending fake streams of e-mail spam to disguise a single targeted message is another innovation used by jihadist communicators, specialists said.

Al Qaeda's success with such tactics has underscored the difficulty of gathering intelligence against the movement. Mohammed's e-mails, once discovered, "were the best actionable intelligence in the whole war" against bin Laden and his adherents, said Arquilla, the Naval Postgraduate School professor. But al Qaeda has been keenly aware of its electronic pursuers and has tried to do what it can to stay ahead -- mostly by using encryption.

Building Cells on the Web

In the last two years, a small number of cases have emerged in which jihadist cells appear to have formed among like-minded strangers who met online, according to intelligence officials and terrorism specialists. And there are many other cases in which bonds formed in the physical world have been sustained and nurtured by the Internet, according to specialists in and outside of government.

For example, Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers burst into the Ottawa home of Mohammed Momin Khawaja, a 24-year-old computer programmer, on March 29, 2004, arresting him for alleged complicity in what Canadian and British authorities described as a transatlantic plot to bomb targets in London and Canada. Khawaja, a contractor with Canada's Foreign Ministry, met his alleged British counterparts online and came to the attention of authorities only when he traveled to Britain and walked into a surveillance operation being conducted by British special police, according to two Western sources familiar with the case.

British prosecutors alleged in court that Khawaja met with his online acquaintances in an Internet cafe in London, where he showed them images of explosive devices found on the Web and told them how to detonate bombs using cell phones. The first person jailed under a strict new Canadian anti-terrorism law passed after Sept. 11, Khawaja is not scheduled to have a preliminary hearing on his case until January.

The transit attacks in London may also have an Internet connection, according to several analysts. They appear to be successful examples of "al Qaeda's assiduous effort to cultivate and train professional insurgents and urban warfare specialists via the Internet," wrote Scheuer, the former CIA analyst.

In a posting not long after the London attacks, a member of one of the al Qaeda-linked online forums asked how to take action himself. A cell of two or three people is better, replied another member in an exchange translated by the SITE Institute. Even better than that is a "virtual cell, an agreement between a group of brothers over the Internet." It is "safe," extolled the anonymous poster, and "nobody will know the identity of each other in the beginning." Once "harmony and mutual trust" are established, training conducted and videos watched, then "you can meet in reality and execute some operation in the field."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/custom/2005/08/05/CU2005080501141.html?whichDay=2

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Briton Used Internet As His Bully Pulpit

By Craig WhitlockWashington Post Foreign ServiceMonday, August 8, 2005; A01

LONDON -- Babar Ahmad, a 31-year-old computer whiz and mechanical engineer, was hailed as a big catch by U.S. law enforcement officials when he was arrested here one year ago on charges that he ran a network of Web sites that served as a propaganda and fundraising front for Islamic extremists, including Chechen rebels, the Taliban militia and al Qaeda affiliates.

Since then, Ahmad has been locked up inside British prisons as he fights extradition to the United States. But the imprisonment has done little to silence the British native of Pakistani descent. Rather, it has given him an even bigger megaphone as he continues to churn out anti-American manifestos and post them on the Web, turning him into a minor celebrity in Britain.

His case shows how a well-educated engineer operating in London could allegedly use the Web to project a message of Islamic extremism to a global audience. While an earlier generation of radicals might have led protest rallies, Ahmad found a way to make the Internet his bully pulpit, magnifying al Qaeda's reach far beyond the handful of radical mosques that had previously propagated Osama bin Laden's message.

Since his arrest, Ahmad, working through relatives and other supporters outside prison, has created a simple but polished Web site, www.freebabarahmad.com/ , to drum up publicity. According to the site, more than 10,000 people have signed an online petition calling on the British government to block his extradition. Hundreds have appeared at public rallies. The BBC aired an entire documentary about efforts by Ahmad's elderly father to secure his release, titling the show, "A Terror Suspect's Dad."

In his bid to avoid prosecution, Ahmad has relied on the technical and communications skills that U.S. prosecutors said he honed for a decade as a pioneering webmaster for Islamic extremist causes. He has also cultivated the support of others who see the Internet as a potential equalizer in what they describe as a battle between Muslims and the West.

"The war is not just a legal war or a military war, but it's an information war and you've got to fight it through the press and the Web as much as anything else," said Bilal Patel, a spokesman for a British Web site called Stoppoliticalterror.com, which has publicized Ahmad's case and worked on his behalf. "The most effective military jihad these days is to use the Internet to spread your ideas, and to use the power of words."

Today, portraying himself as an innocent victim, Ahmad has generated sympathy by arguing that extradition to the United States would violate his rights as a British citizen. Playing to widespread misgivings over the Bush administration's tactics in its self-proclaimed "war on terrorism," he has predicted that he will wind up at Guantanamo Bay or on death row if he is handed over to the Americans, even though the U.S. government has pledged otherwise.

"I know, and God knows, that I am not a terrorist and that I have not done anything wrong or illegal," he wrote in January. "We live in an era where countries go to war, destroy homes, create orphans and kill thousands of people, based on reasons that turn out to be lies. Do you think that it is beyond such people to imprison a handful of individuals based on lies? They are capable of anything."A Savvy Recruitment Tool

In late 1996, while a 22-year-old undergraduate at Imperial College in London, Ahmad launched a Web site dedicated to promoting Islamic fighters in Bosnia, Chechnya and Afghanistan, according to U.S. federal prosecutors. Dubbed Azzam.com, in honor of Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian who served as bin Laden's spiritual mentor, the Web site rapidly became a prominent and influential English-language platform for Islamic militants.

According to U.S. prosecutors and terrorism analysts, Ahmad enabled radical jihadists to deliver their message to a global audience by connecting to Azzam.com and several of his sister Web sites, including Qoqaz.net and Waaqiah.com. Although the sites were shut down in 2001 and 2002, in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackings in the United States, Justice Department officials trumpeted his arrest by British police last August as a major victory in their efforts to target tech-savvy Islamic extremists.

Ahmad's azzam.com catered to English speakers, featured snazzy graphics and couched its radical politics in a moderate tone by posting firsthand news reports from amateur correspondents around the world. International news organizations, including the BBC, often cited dispatches from Azzam.com and its sister Web sites when reporting on events in Chechnya and Afghanistan.

In contrast, many other Web sites sponsored by Islamic extremists in those days were technologically primitive and often published in Arabic, limiting their audience. Azzam.com represented a breakthrough, allowing militant groups to spread their message worldwide and recruit new followers.

"It was the very first real al Qaeda Web site," said Evan Kohlmann, a New York-based terrorism researcher who has tracked Azzam.com since the late 1990s. "It taught an entire generation about jihad. Even in its nascency, it was professional. It wasn't technically sophisticated, but it was professional looking, definitely more professional than any other jihadi Web sites out there."

According to a U.S. indictment filed in October, Ahmad used Azzam.com to solicit donations for Chechen rebels and the Taliban, and arranged for the training and transportation of Islamic fighters. Among the specific charges is one alleging that Azzam.com posted messages in early 2001 containing specific instructions for supporters to deliver cash payments of up to $20,000 to Taliban officials in Pakistan.

In addition, the indictment states, Ahmad and unnamed co-conspirators bought camouflage suits, global positioning equipment and gas masks for Islamic militants.

While federal prosecutors described Ahmad's material support for terrorist groups as significant, they said the primary threat posed by his Web sites was their power to spread dangerous ideas by exhorting people around the world to take up arms and become Islamic fighters themselves.

Kohlmann, the terrorism researcher, said Azzam.com made its reputation in part by hawking some of the earliest English-language videotapes to glorify Islamic fighters. One top-selling video, titled "Martyrs of Bosnia," was produced in 1997 and featured a masked narrator -- thought to be Ahmad -- waving an automatic rifle and urging Muslims to go to the Balkans to kill nonbelievers.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Azzam.com printed a lengthy article in praise of the "Nineteen Lions," a reference to the 19 hijackers who crashed airplanes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania.

"The attacks on September 11 2001, which saw the WTC turned to rubble and destroyed an entire section of the Pentagon, were the single most courageous and momentous act of Modern History, sending shockwaves throughout the World, which are still palpable today," read the article, signed by a person who identified himself as Muadh bin Abdullah Al-Madani, from Uruzgan, Afghanistan. "Without doubt, it was the defining moment in the battle between those who wish to destroy Islam and those who wish to make the Name of Allah Most High."

Mounting a Defense

U.S. prosecutors have outlined their case against Ahmad in an indictment and a supporting affidavit filed last year in U.S. District Court in Connecticut, which is where the Briton will face trial if he is extradited. The British government is scheduled to decide in September whether to approve Ahmad's transfer, although both sides expect the case will be appealed to the British High Court.

Ahmad was first arrested in December 2003 by British police on suspicion of terrorist activities, but they released him after a week and declined to file charges. U.S. prosecutors pressed their own charges nine months later, claiming jurisdiction because he allegedly used Internet service providers in Connecticut and Nevada.

During a series of extradition hearings in London since then, U.S. government officials have made other allegations against Ahmad, accusing him of attempting to organize a training camp for Islamic militants in Arizona in 1998 and meeting people near Phoenix who had access to bin Laden. Lawyers representing the U.S. government during the extradition hearings have also said that Ahmad tried to buy 5,000 tons of sulfur phosphate, allegedly for mixing explosives, in 1997 and 1998.

Although London earned a reputation in the 1990s as a haven for Islamic extremists and radical clerics who took advantage of free speech protections to advocate violence and the overthrow of governments, Ahmad did his work secretly and went to considerable lengths to conceal his identity as the sponsor of Azzam.com, according to the indictment.

Ahmad's relatives dismissed the charges as "rubbish" and said he was being unfairly targeted because he filed a brutality complaint against British police after he was arrested in 2003. Neither he nor his family have responded in detail to the charges against him.

"As far as the allegations, we're not going to talk about them," his wife, Maryam Ahmad, said in an interview. "If they are the ones giving the allegations, let them prove it."

Family members said it is telling that British authorities have not filed their own charges against Ahmad, given that he allegedly operated Azzam.com while living in London.

"If you think he is guilty, why not give him a fair trial in this country?" Maryam Ahmad said. "For us to mount a defense for Babar would be very, very easy. Their case would crumble. If it did come to trial, we could form a very solid defense. That's undisputed."

Declining to address the facts of the case, or to discuss his political and religious views, Ahmad and his family have instead focused on portraying him as a normal, middle-class British professional.

His Web site features a black-and-white photo of him as a smooth-faced toddler, eschewing adult pictures that would reveal his full beard, a suggestion of strict Islamic faith. The site describes in detail how as a child he was kind to animals, and includes dozens of testimonials from friends and colleagues. It also asserts that he never had any scrapes with the law, not even a parking ticket, before his arrest.

Ahmad's most outspoken supporters in Britain include luminaries such as actress Vanessa Redgrave and several members of Parliament. With Redgrave's backing, Ahmad ran for Parliament in May on a platform of overhauling Britain's anti-terrorism laws.

Confined to his prison cell during the campaign, he received only 685 votes, or about 2 percent of the total cast in his district. But he managed to stir debate over a new treaty that provides for the speedier extradition of British terrorism suspects, such as himself, to the United States. The treaty allows the United States to seek extradition of Britons without submitting specific evidence of their guilt, and even if they do not face criminal charges at home, but the extraditable offense must be punishable by the laws of both states.

"Electing Babar would be the most powerful message on human rights and justice that could be given," the actor Corin Redgrave, Vanessa's brother, said at a campaign event in April, when he announced that he had recruited Ahmad to run for Parliament as a member of the antiwar Peace and Progress Party. "Just let the Americans try to say that an elected MP should be extradited."

Tracking a Cyber-Activist

U.S. law enforcement officials have said Ahmad secretly operated the Azzam.com and its sister Web sites while studying and working at Imperial College, a science, technology and engineering school in central London.

After receiving a master's degree in mechanical engineering six years ago, Ahmad landed a job at Imperial as a computing and networking specialist and worked there full time until his arrest in August 2004. U.S. prosecutors allege that he ran his Web site in part by relying on college networks; British police raided his campus office when he was first arrested in 2003. Imperial College officials did not respond to phone calls and e-mails seeking comment.

Friends and colleagues at Imperial said they had no inkling of Ahmad's Internet activities. Although he was active in the campus Islamic Society, they said he was seen as a voice of moderation, not extremism.

When a controversial Islamic sect tried to establish a presence at Imperial a few years ago, Ahmad was outspoken in opposing the group but also tried to calm tensions by building consensus among Muslim students, said Mustafa Arif, the president of the Imperial College student union.

"He was the father figure in that debate," said Arif, who has known Ahmad for six years. "A lot of the vitriolic talk he was opposed to. He was one of those Muslims whose views were that Muslims need to sort themselves out before they can deal with who they think their oppressors are. That's why it was such a shock when he was arrested. It just went counter to everything we knew about him."

British and U.S. officials started paying close attention to Ahmad after the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. U.S. Homeland Security agents said in court papers that they began investigating Ahmad and Azzam.com four years ago.

In an interview for a BBC documentary last month, Andrew Ramsey, a friend of Ahmad, said he was approached a few years ago by the British domestic intelligence service, MI5, and offered money to spy on the webmaster. Ramsey said he declined.

Ramsey said he converted to Islam largely because of Ahmad's influence. He said Ahmad introduced him to Azzam.com, which persuaded him to travel to Afghanistan to help the Taliban before the militia was removed from power during the U.S.-led invasion of the country.

"Azzam was an English Web site for a start. That made a lot of impact," Ramsey said. "An English Web site that covered a controversial issue, which is the issue of jihad. When the first set of images started coming through -- murdered children, murdered women, murdered men -- it has that kind of shock effect, like, 'Wow!' "
Azzam.com struggled to remain on the Internet after Sept. 11, as the U.S. government and private groups pressured its Web service providers to yank the site because of its content. Azzam.com vanished and reappeared several times in different formats over the next several months, before giving up for good in late 2002, although other Web sites still carry some of its original postings, pamphlets and videos.

It is unclear why U.S. prosecutors waited until last summer to file charges against Ahmad. Virtually all of the crimes described in the indictment against him occurred before 2002, and he is not alleged to have attempted to rebuild his Web sites in recent years.

One possible explanation can be traced to the arrest in July 2004 of an accused al Qaeda operative in Pakistan, Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan. A British citizen, Khan was caught with laptops that allegedly contained detailed surveillance information on financial targets in the United States, including the World Bank headquarters in Washington, according to U.S. and Pakistani officials.

U.S. intelligence officials said Khan is also Ahmad's cousin. Although they declined to comment on whether their cases are related, Khan reportedly cooperated with Pakistani and U.S. investigators after his arrest, agreeing to send e-mails to other al Qaeda figures in an attempt to entrap them.

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The Web as Weapon
Zarqawi Intertwines Acts on Ground in Iraq With Propaganda Campaign on the Internet

By Susan B. Glasser and Steve CollWashington Post Staff WritersTuesday, August 9, 2005; A01

The jihadist bulletin boards were buzzing. Soon, promised the spokesman for al Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers, a new video would be posted with the latest in mayhem from Iraq's best-known insurgent group.

On June 29, the new release hit the Internet. "All Religion Will Be for Allah" is 46 minutes of live-action war in Iraq, a slickly produced video with professional-quality graphics and the feel of a blood-and-guts annual report.

In one chilling scene, the video cuts to a brigade of smiling young men. They are the only fighters shown unmasked, and the video explains why: They are a corps of suicide bombers-in-training.

As notable as the video was the way Abu Musab Zarqawi's "information wing" distributed it to the world: a specially designed Web page, with dozens of links to the video, so users could choose which version to download. There were large-file editions that consumed 150 megabytes for viewers with high-speed Internet and a scaled-down four-megabyte version for those limited to dial-up access. Viewers could choose Windows Media or RealPlayer. They could even download "All Religion Will Be for Allah" to play on a cell phone.

Never before has a guerrilla organization so successfully intertwined its real-time war on the ground with its electronic jihad, making Zarqawi's group practitioners of what experts say will be the future of insurgent warfare, where no act goes unrecorded and atrocities seem to be committed in order to be filmed and distributed nearly instantaneously online.

Zarqawi has deployed a whole inventory of Internet operations beyond the shock video. He immortalizes his suicide bombers online, with video clips of the destruction they wreak and Web biographies that attest to their religious zeal. He taunts the U.S. military with an online news service of his exploits, releasing tactical details of operations multiple times a day. He publishes a monthly Internet magazine, Thurwat al-Sinam (literally "The Camel's Hump"), that offers religious justifications for jihad and military advice on how to conduct it.

His negotiations with Osama bin Laden over joining forces with al Qaeda were conducted openly on the Internet. When he was almost captured recently, he left behind not a Kalashnikov assault rifle, the traditional weapon of the guerrilla leader, but a laptop computer. An entire online network of Zarqawi supporters serves as backup for his insurgent group in Iraq, providing easily accessible advice on the best routes into the country, trading information down to the names of mosques in Syria that can host a would-be fighter, and eagerly awaiting the latest posting from the man designated as Zarqawi's only official spokesman.

"The technology of the Internet facilitated everything," declared a posting this spring by the Global Islamic Media Front, which often distributes Zarqawi messages on the Internet. Today's Web sites are "the way for everybody in the whole world to listen to the mujaheddin."

Little more than a year ago, this online empire did not exist. Zarqawi was an Internet nonentity, a relatively obscure Jordanian who was one of many competing leaders of the Iraq insurgency. Once every few days, a communique appeared from him on the Web. Today, Zarqawi is an international name "of enormous symbolic importance," as Army Lt. Gen. David Petraeus put it in a recent interview, on a par with bin Laden largely because of his group's proficiency at publicizing him on the Internet.

By this summer, Internet trackers such as the SITE Institute have recorded an average of nine online statements from the Iraq branch of al Qaeda every day, 180 statements in the first three weeks of July. Zarqawi has gone "from zero to 60" in his use of the Internet, said Michael Scheuer, former chief of the CIA unit that tracked bin Laden. "The difference between Zarqawi's media performance initially and today is extraordinary."

As with most breakthroughs, it was a combination of technology and timing. Zarqawi launched his jihad in Iraq "at the right point in the evolution of the technology," said Ben N. Venzke, whose firm IntelCenter monitors jihadist sites for U.S. government agencies. High-speed Internet access was increasingly prevalent. New, relatively low-cost tools to make and distribute high-quality video were increasingly available. "Greater bandwidth, better video compression, better video editing tools -- all hit the maturity point when you had a vehicle as well as the tools," he said.

The original al Qaeda always aspired to use technology in its war on the West. But bin Laden's had been the moment of fax machines and satellite television. "Zarqawi is a new generation," said Evan F. Kohlmann, a consultant who closely monitors the sites. "The people around him are in their twenties. They view the media differently. The original al Qaeda are hiding in the mountains, not a technologically very well-equipped place. Iraq is an urban combat zone. Technology is a big part of that. I don't know how to distinguish the Internet now from the military campaign in general in Iraq."

The Videotaped Atrocity

After Abu Musab Zarqawi swung the curved blade of his sword and decapitated Nicholas Berg, he picked up the bloodied head of his victim and screamed out praise to Allah. The camera lingered on the dead man's wild eyes.

The exact date of this atrocity is unclear. The date the world came to know about it is not.

On May 11, 2004, a posting with a link to the video appeared on the al-AnsarWeb forum. Soon, it had been downloaded millions of times, freezing up servers from Indonesia to the United States. A wave of copycat beheadings by other groups followed. Zarqawi became a household name.

It was, said Kohlmann, "the 9/11 of jihad on the Internet -- momentous for them and momentous for us. For years, people were saying how the Internet would be used by terrorists. And then all of a sudden somebody was beheaded on camera and it was, 'Holy smokes, we never thought about the Internet being used this way!' "

Televised beheadings were not uncommon in Saudi Arabia. But Zarqawi did not use the long executioner's sword of Saudi government-sanctioned beheadings. Instead, he invoked the imagery of his American captive as an animal.

"They take what anyone who's ever been to a halal butcher shop would recognize as a halal butcher knife and they cut the side of the neck and saw at it, bleed him out, just as they do when they're killing sheep," said Rebecca Givner-Forbes, who monitors the jihadist Web sites for the Terrorism Research Center, an Arlington firm with U.S. government clients. "Originally, they used the word for 'sacrifice,' which suggests the death has some kind of meaning, and then they used the word they use to butcher animals."

Khattab, a Jordanian-born commander of foreign fighters in Chechnya, videotaped graphic attacks on Russian forces in the 1990s and packaged them together as videotapes called "Russian Hell," which sold in Western mosques and Middle Eastern bazaars and now circulate on the Internet.

The immediate precursor to the Berg video was the 2002 execution-style killing of journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, which was taped and distributed electronically when mainstream news outlets refused to show it. But even the horrific scene of Pearl's throat being slit failed to gain the audience that Zarqawi commanded two years later, coming as it did before widespread availability of broadband Internet to play back the video.

Zarqawi, a veteran fighter who had run his own training camp in the western Afghan city of Herat before fleeing to northern Iraq during the 2001 U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, had never been known as an Internet innovator.

His first statement from Iraq that gained wide circulation did so not because it was online but because it was intercepted and released by the U.S. occupation authority. The January 2004 letter to al Qaeda urged creation of "armies of mujaheddin."

On April 9, 2004, a short video clip was posted on the Internet, the first attributed to Zarqawi's group, according to Kohlmann. It was called "Heroes of Fallujah," and it showed several black-masked men laying a roadside bomb, disguising it in a hole in the dusty road, then watching as it blew up a U.S. armored personnel carrier.

Later that month, on April 25, Zarqawi issued his first written Internet communique, asserting responsibility for an attack near the southern city of Basra. "We have made the decision and raised the banner of the jihad," it said. "We have taken spearheads and javelins for a boat in our cruise toward glory."

And then it cited a verse from the Koran: "Fight them, Allah will torture them at your hands. . . . "

Winning Prominence

"The Winds of Victory" opens with footage of the American bombing of Baghdad. It is nighttime, and the screen is dark except for the violent orange explosions and the wry captions "Democracy" and "Freedom" written in Arabic.

The film was the first full-length propaganda video produced by Zarqawi's organization, complete with scenes of mutilated Iraqi children and the horrors of Abu Ghraib prison -- and it hit the Internet in June 2004, a month after Berg's killing.

For the first time, the video put names and faces on the foreign suicide bombers who had flocked to Iraq under Zarqawi's banner, showing staged readings of wills and young men from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Libya and elsewhere in the Arab world looking alternately scared and playful. Video footage of their explosions followed their testimonials, often filmed from multiple angles.

But the hour-long film was too big to send out all at once online and had to be broken into chapters released one a week. "Hardly ideal for a propaganda video," Kohlmann said.

That same summer, as copycat beheaders circulated footage of their attacks in Iraq and Saudi Arabia, Zarqawi was fully exploiting his electronic distribution network. In early July, he released his first audio recording, putting it directly on the Internet -- unlike the tapes of al Qaeda leaders bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri, which still go directly to Arab satellite television. His beheading of Berg was completely justified, Zarqawi said, and those Muslims who disagreed were just "slaves."

Later that month, "astonished" at mistaken reports about the group's activities, Zarqawi's organization urged its audience "not to believe this false information." Henceforth, Zarqawi said, "all of our statements are spread by means of the brother Abu Maysara al-Iraqi," making him an official Internet spokesman.

At the same time, Zarqawi was in negotiations in a series of online missives with al Qaeda about pledging allegiance to bin Laden. For months, a main sticking point was Zarqawi's insistence on targeting representatives of Iraq's Shiite majority as well as the U.S. military, bin Laden's preferred enemy.

But Zarqawi had acquired huge new prominence through his Internet-broadcast beheadings. The once-wary al Qaeda leadership seemed to take a new attitude toward him, and the online magazine of al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia hailed him as the "sheikh of slaughterers."

On Oct. 17, 2004, the deal was struck and announced in cyberspace as the U.S. military was launching an offensive in Fallujah, determined to drive Zarqawi's men out of their sanctuary. Zarqawi pledged fealty to bin Laden and spoke in his online posting of eight months of negotiations, interrupted by a "rupture." Experts believe their contact was almost exclusively in the open space of the Internet.

Two days later, Zarqawi put out his first statement in the new name of his organization. Once called Tawhid wal Jihad (Unity and Holy War), it was now the Al Qaeda Committee for Jihad in the Land of the Two Rivers.

Instant Communication

For 26 minutes, the instructional video lays out in precise detail how to construct the item that more than any other has come to symbolize the Iraq insurgency -- a suicide bomber's explosive belt.

It shows how to estimate the impact of an explosion, how best to arrange the shrapnel for maximum destruction, how to strap the belt onto the bomber's body, even how to avoid the migraine headache that can come from exposure to the recommended explosive chemicals.

The video -- all in Arabic -- appeared on the al-Ansar forum, where it was found one Sunday in December 2004 by the SITE Institute. The forum where Berg's beheading had also first appeared was one of Zarqawi's preferred Internet venues, among the dozens of password-protected jihadi Web forums that have proliferated over the last few years.

This and other Arabic-language forums hosted discussions on the latest news from Iraq, provided a place for swapping tips on tradecraft, circulated religious justifications for jihad, and acted as intermediary between would-be fighters and their would-be recruiters. Most of the sites prohibit postings from unapproved users, but they can be accessed in the open and rely on widely available software called vBulletin ("instant community," promises the software's maker).

Many postings to the boards were not official statements from al Qaeda but unsolicited advice, such as the recent notice called "the road to Mesopotamia" posted on an underground Syrian extremist site, in which one veteran offered a detailed scouting report, down to advice on bribing Syrian police and traveling to the border areas by claiming to be on a fishing trip.

The bulletin boards also make information quickly available from Iraq, where fighters are gaining combat experience against the U.S. military. In one case cited by John Arquilla, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in California, would-be insurgents in the Sahara Desert were able to ask for -- and receive -- information from the ground in Iraq about how best to build bombs.

And the bulletin boards keep track of Zarqawi's corps of suicide bombers, with long online lists of the "martyrs" compiled from various sources. Israeli researcher Reuven Paz has a list gleaned from the postings of more than 400 Zarqawi recruits who have died in Iraq. Paz said the biographies are an informal census very much in keeping with the profile of an Arab Internet user -- middle class and highly educated, "people with wives and kids and good jobs," Paz said, "going, as if by magic, after the virtual leader."

In March, one of the al-Ansar forum's own members became another entry. For the previous 11 months, Zaman Hawan had confined his jihad to 178 online postings to the forum. But on March 24, 2005, according to another forum member's announcement, he "carried his soul on his hand, and went to jihad for the sake of Allah," dying in a suicide attack in Baqubah, Iraq. The posting went on to list phone numbers in Sudan for forum members to call Hawan's father and brother and congratulate them on his "martyrdom."

By April, the al-Ansar bulletin board had become too well known as Zarqawi's outlet. The forum closed without notice. Alternatives quickly appeared. For a while, "mirror" sites emerged featuring many of the same users, with the same logins and passwords. They, too, disappeared. The al-Masada forum briefly took up the banner. Then participants began to warn that it had been breached by Western intelligence -- and the jihadists abandoned it, as well.

The upheaval has resulted in a much more decentralized system for disseminating the bulletins from Iraq, with new boards constantly cropping up. As soon as a posting from Zarqawi's group appears now, dozens of new links to it are copied to the other jihadist sites within minutes, making for an intricate game of Internet cat-and-mouse. And even if the forums or fixed Web sites are temporarily out of commission, other ways still exist -- such as mass e-mails sent out several times a day with the latest in Iraq guerrilla videos, communiques and commentary from Yahoo e-groups such as ansar-jehad.

While Zarqawi's group has moved away in recent months from videotaped beheadings of foreigners, the shock value of the Berg beheading has created a race for more and more realistic video clips from Iraq. Filming an attack has become an integral part of the attack itself. In April, a cameraman followed alongside an armed insurgent, video rolling, as they ran to the scene of a helicopter they had just shot down north of Baghdad. The one member of the Bulgarian crew found still alive was ordered to stand up and start walking, then shot multiple times on film as the shooter yelled, "This is Allah's judgment." The three-minute video from the Islamic Army of Iraq came at a time when many of the bulletin board sites were down; SITE Institute's Rita Katz found the link through the ansar-jehad e-group.

"It's the exact reason why we built the Internet, a bargain-basement, redundant system for distributing information," said Kohlmann. "We can't shut it down anymore."

Indeed, just last week, a notice went out on the jihadist bulletin boards: The Ansar forum that had disappeared in April was back up and running.

The Information Battle

A few weeks ago, al Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers released the third version of its online magazine, Thurwat al-Sinam. This latest issue lectured on the recipe for a successful raid, an almost-scientific procedure involving six steps for planning and executing, with five groups of fighters designated by tasks such as "protection," "gap-making" and "pushing in."

The magazine also held up a model for the Internet campaign that has built Zarqawi's reputation, provided his recruits, served as his propagandist and his carrier pigeon. In an essay aimed broadly at the Muslim world, the magazine claimed the 7th-century Koran as a useful blueprint for today's wired warriors in Iraq, calling its story of the prophet Muhammad's pitch to the people of Mecca "a very good example of how to conduct an information battle with the infidels."

Battles can be won in Iraq but then ultimately lost if they are not on the Internet. "The aim is not to execute an operation, which is followed by complete silence, but telling the reason why it was executed," the magazine advised. "It is a must that we give this field what it deserves. . . . How many battles has this nation lost because of the lack of information?"