Their goal to widen the pool of prospective terrorists beyond traditional Middle East and Asia sources is part of a search for “white al-Qaeda” activists who could foil racial profiling and initiate attacks, according to Evan Kohlmann, a consultant with FlashPoint Partners, a New York-based security research company. The effort is consistent with the gradual decentralization of Islamic-inspired holy war, he said.
Appeals for nonmembers to carry out small-scale attacks are a departure for al-Qaeda, the global terrorist network headed by Osama bin Laden. It maintained centralized command and training for many years, masterminding the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington. After Sept. 11, it pledged to trump the mass killing with even more spectacular assaults.
As the U.S. kept up pressure on al-Qaeda hideouts in Afghanistan and Pakistan, its leaders exercised less control over related organizations and have begun to encourage attacks by unaffiliated individuals, Kohlmann said. Al-Qaeda released a video message in English last month by Adam Gadahn, an American- born spokesman, appealing for hits on targets big and small.
Colleen LaRose, the Pennsylvania woman who used the alias “Jihad Jane,” recruited men and women on the Internet and solicited funds for terrorists, prosecutors said in court filings. She pleaded not guilty March 18 in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia to charges she plotted to recruit jihadist fighters and conspired to murder a Swedish resident.
“Jihadis are desperate to find people like that as low- level recruits,” Jarret Brachman, author of “Global Jihadism: Theory and Practice” and a research fellow at North Dakota State University in Fargo, said in an interview. “There’s always a clamor at jihad Web sites for people who can speak and translate English.”
Kohlmann identified the rise of Ansar al-Mujahideen, a non- al-Qaeda site, as exemplifying “a prolific, multilanguage enterprise with an enviable following of skilled and highly motivated English-speaking members,” in a February report for the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York.
The site’s English forum offers such items as an article with “Advice to the Brethren Leaving for Jihad” and a video of an attack on a transport truck for police vehicles in Iraq.
It links to a broadcast by al-Awlaki calling on American Muslims to take up jihad and an interview with Hammam Khalil al- Balawi, a Jordanian who was a double agent for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency until December 2009, when he blew himself up in Afghanistan, killing seven CIA operatives.
Enticing “lone-wolf” terrorists is a symptom of the “continued weakening of the core al-Qaeda group,” and the “trend toward decentralization,” Stratfor, a political-risk consulting company in Austin, Texas, said in a March report. Atomization of holy war comes at a price, Stratfor added: The would-be killers may be less skilful than trained ones, and less committed.
“Not putting their recruits through a more formal training regimen also makes it more difficult for groups to thoroughly indoctrinate recruits with jihadist ideology,” the report said.
It isn’t clear that expanding English-language Internet efforts will lead to a major increase in attacks, Brachman said, adding “I don’t think yet you can be sure of a causal relationship between non-Arabic Web sites and active jihad.”
Even so, there’s a danger that authorities will view online militants as armchair “jihobbyists” and won’t take their threats seriously, Kohlmann said. “It doesn’t take a Ph.D. to kill someone.”
Filed under: Profiling, Radicalisation
