Terrorism Online

What can be more innocuous than a good chess game between "Abu Mujahid" and "Mohd. Azzam," who are apparently friends.

Since you may not know French, German or Arabic, you probably won’t care what they’re talking about on the online chat facility available to all the members of www.chess.net.

But, for all you know, Abu Mujahid may really be an Afghan Taliban rebel leader and Mohammad Azzam (the name of a slain Palestinian terrorist) may actually be a Palestinian freedom fighter. And their conversation may actually be a coded progress report on another terrorist attack on any city in the free world, perhaps including Manila, Cebu or Davao.

The spooky part of it is this scenario is not as far fetched as it seems. The Internet is already being used by extremist hate groups of all stripes throughout the world. And it is reasonable to surmise that it was probably used to plan and coordinate the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.

All a terrorist financier in Kabul, Afghanistan needs is a satellite phone to send a coded e-mail to the Web-based address of suicidal freedom fighters in New York. The terrorists don’t even have to own a computer. They can use the facilities of the thousands of cybercafés that dot every modern metropolis.

Even new recruits don’t have to go very far to learn the horrific methods of the terrorist trade.

According to an Indian think tank, an organization called the Jihad Webring will provide new terrorists with common reference points where new mujahedeen or Islamist rebels can learn about the jihad or the Islamic holy war in different countries. Through the organization, they can also know where to buy weapons and get written instructions on urban warfare and low-intensity conflict.

Terrorist financiers don’t even have to worry about the quality of the online instruction because many of them were collated from the United States Marine Corps doctrine and war fighting publications and US Army field manuals. One can directly access many of these articles at the Army Doctrine and Training Digital Library sites, by just clicking on the relevant titles.

Bomb-making online

Budding terrorists don’t even have to search very far to learn how to get attention. An ordinary query made to the search engine Yahoo! on how to make a bomb yielded 442,000 webpage matches. So accessible are these websites that the Washington Post published in 1998 an article on how too many teenagers are learning to make potentially-destructive pipe bombs via the Internet.

Also available online are excerpts from the notorious bomb-making manuals Anarchist’s Cookbook and Homemade Weapons.. Other bomb-making instructions are also available online with numerous pages devoted to terror manuals in addition to the often innocent postings of professional information on Usenet newsgroups.

William Powell’s legendary Anarchist’s Cookbook, first published in 1971, has inspired many webpages. Although the book has not been available on the Web in its entirety, a number of webpages contain works named after it, such as "The Anarchist Cookbook IV," otherwise known as the BHU Pyrotechnics Cookbook.

Explosive-related sections of this document, which is widely available on the Web, include "Making Plastic Explosives," "Napalm" and "Revised Pipe Bombs

According to the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, federal agents investigating at least 30 bombings and four attempted bombings between 1985 and June 1996 recovered bomb-making literature that the suspects had obtained from the Internet.

In these investigations, the possession of bomb-making literature has been taken by law enforcement authorities as strong circumstantial evidence that this literature has been used to plan crimes.

Another notorious online manual, the Terrorist’s Handbook, instructs readers how to construct so-called "high order explosives" such as ammonium nitrate and dynamites as well as molotov cocktails, phone bombs, and other destructive devices.

This handbook also includes a "Checklist for Raids on Labs," concluding that "in the end, the serious terrorist would probably realize that if he/she wishes to make a truly useful explosive, he or she will have to steal the chemicals to make the explosive from a lab."

Cyberwar

Of course, terrorist organizations and other hate groups have been turning to the Internet to propagate their cause.

There are about 150 sites relating to jihad, most them maintained by by Muslim extremist organizations in different parts of the world, like the Hamas, the Hizbollah and the Islamic Salvation Front of Algeria, among others.

The Taliban government of Afghanistan also used to have its own site, apparently maintained in Islamabad, Pakistan, but this has disappeared after the United Nations imposed sanctions on it in November last year.

Taliban sympathizers, however, need not fret because they can read the online monthly e-zine Dharb-e-M’umin for news about Afghanistan, Kashmir and Chechnya.

Surprisingly, there are very few sites on Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden. There are far more references to the late Mohammad Azzam, a Palestinian who, along with bin Laden, was quite active during the Afghan war and who was mysteriously killed in the late 1980s. However, the complete text of a book on jihad by Azzam is also available on the Web.

But if the Internet can be used to propagate hate, the Internet is also being used to fight terrorism and other hate groups.

Only hours after the attack in New York and Washington, Internet users were viewing nine million pages an hour by Tuesday compared to a normal average of 14 million for the entire day.

US-based Keynote Systems Inc., which measures Internet performance, said that early on Tuesday, the websites it tracked took longer to reach – nearly 13 seconds compared to a daily average of five.

Internet users apparently turned to the Internet to overcome their shock and think of how they can be of help. Others also went online just to express their anger behind online aliases.

In an America Online chatroom, many used racial slurs against Arabs, prompting Muslim and Arab-American leaders to plead with the American public not to take out its anger on their communities.

More productive were visits to sites such as the US-basedwww. terrorism.com and Israel-based www.ict.org.il, the website of the International Policy Institute on Counter-Terrorism, which provides information and terrorism, counter-terrorism and profiles of terrorist groups all over the world, including the Philippines’ Abu Sayyaf.

The Anti-Defamation League, also based in the US, maintains an educational website (www.adl.org) where one can get a studied position on hate groups, like white supremacists and neo-Nazis.

US government agencies, like the Federal Bureau of Investigation (www.fbi.gov), also maintain sites where concerned individuals can relay information on suspected terrorists or their activities.

And with the emerging global concensus generated by the attacks on New York and Washington, the online battle against international terrorism and hate groups is likely to heighten, even if Internet users can contribute only informational websites on terrorism and hate groups in their area.

After all, one cannot hope to defeat an enemy without understanding the issues involved and such issues can be sufficiently explored even if terrorists are also using the same weapons to promote their cause.