Interesting report from Jamestown on infiltrating mujahideen bulletin boards, specifically the al-Hesba site, known as a site of first resort for posting jihad proclamations of various kinds, presumably also including practical stuff – bomb making; your AK-47 and you, etc.
In mid-March, a further impetus to suspect al-Hesbah was voiced by members of the Tajdeed jihadi forum (http://www.tajdeed.org.uk), who blamed the site for the arrest of the infamous cyber-mujahid Irhabi007, also known as Younis Tsouli, by British intelligence last October. Irhabi007 had been hunted for two years as an al-Qaeda webmaster and the suspected source of many of the al-Qaeda declarations posted on the net. With his close links to al-Qaeda, his arrest is considered an important event in the struggle against jihadi sites. Members also wondered aloud how the report by the Society for Internet Research (SOFIR), analyzing the readership of the al-Hesbah site, could have been compiled without inside collaboration. Some of these suspicions focused around the fact that al-Hesbah's administrators requested that applicants for registration provide their country of origin, and rejected the applicants' use of proxies to disguise their personal details; these requests are unusual for a jihadi forum. There were also concerns that there was an unusual concentration of a single nationality—Jordanians—on the administration staff and that this surely opened up the possibility of security penetration.
In the general air of suspicion, it then just took one (planted?) newspaper story to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt around like marmite:
Four days later, mujahideen readers of the forums were shaken by a report by the pan-Arab al-Quds al-Arabi that notable Saudi dissident Sheikhs Saad al-Fagih and Abu Majid had added their weight to the belief of the site's penetration, and that this was indeed one of the reasons for the early capture of the militants involved in the Abqaiq attack. Al-Fagih also claimed that there were several jihadi forums penetrated by intelligence services and that via this method the Saudis had come to know that jihadi cells were planning to target members of the ruling family (al-Quds al-Arabi, March 30).
Stephen Ulph concludes:
As significant figures such as Irhabi007 and the Abqaiq attackers continue to fall to counter-intelligence strikes, confidence in the internet forum as a means for mujahideen to circumvent state control of media and communications will be severely shaken. The administrators of the jihadi forums, for all the copious information they provide on proxies and identity concealment, may find this confidence difficult to restore.And why this matters:
The official inquiry into the 7 July London bombings will say the attack was planned on a shoestring budget from information on the internet, that there was no 'fifth-bomber' and no direct support from al-Qaeda, although two of the bombers had visited Pakistan……Far from being the work of an international terror network, as originally suspected, the attack was carried out by four men who had scoured terror sites on the internet. Their knapsack bombs cost only a few hundred pounds, according to the first completed draft of the government's definitive report into the blasts.
If those channels are compromised, it’s going to be much harder to mount another attack in the same way. Assuming you can trust anything the Home Office says, that is.
"Don't tell me I'm burning the candle at both ends -- tell me where to
get more wax!!"
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Posted by: Undippent | May 08, 2008 at 08:42 PM