Jihad online : how do terrorists use the internet?

Terrorism is designed to attract attention to the terrorist's cause and to spread fear and anxiety among wide circles of the targeted population. This paper provides information about the ways terrorists are using the Internet. The threat of terrorism is real and significant. As the Internet becomes a major arena for modern terrorists, we need to understand how modern terrorism operates and devise appropriate methods to forestall such activities

Indonesia’s Lamongan network: how East Java, Poso and Syria are linked

A network of extremists in East Java illustrates how support for a local jihadi struggle in Poso, Central Sulawesi is linked to support for the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS), now called Islamic State. Understanding that network could lead to more effective counter-extremism programs. Introduction The trajectory of an extremist network in Lamongan, East Java illustrates how support for local jihadi struggles has been transformed into support for ISIS. Better understanding of that process could lead to the development of more targeted counter-extremism programs. Lamongan, a district some 50km west of Surabaya, Indonesia’s second largest city, first came to international attention in 2002 as the home of Bali bombers Amrozi, Mukhlas and Ali Imron and the boarding school their family ran, Pesantren al-Islam. It was in the news again in March 2015 when two sisters-in-law from Lamongan were deported from Turkey with their children after trying to get to ISIS-controlled Syria. One was a widow; the other was trying to join her husband, Siswanto, one of the thousands of foreign fighters in the ISIS army—and a former teacher at al-Islam. One of the most important lessons of the Lamongan network is that pro-ISIS groups in Indonesia have emerged from existing radical networks that have never gone away. They may have morphed, realigned, regrouped and regenerated but they are not new. A second lesson is that it is not possible to understand Indonesian pro-ISIS networks without understanding Poso, the former conflict area in central Sulawesi. Since 2000, extremists have seen it as a secure base (qaedah aminah) and training center with the potential to expand into a community that applies Islamic law. In 2009-2010, there was a short-lived project to transfer that base to Aceh, the only Indonesian province authorised to apply Islamic law. When it failed, with police breaking up a training camp in late February 2010 and eventually arresting more than 100 suspects, Poso again became the refuge of choice, under the leadership of a former combatant named Santoso—the target of a massive police operation as this report went to press—who sought to train recruits for the jihad against enemies of an Islamic state in Indonesia. Lamongan provided some of those recruits. There is more to the Poso story, however. The extremists there were never very strong in terms of numbers or competence. Interest in jihad at home had steadily declined after the strength of radical groups peaked in 1999-2001. But committed ideologues wanted to keep alive the idea of a secure base. They needed to convince themselves that the dozens of often not very impressive men sent to Poso for training would constitute the base for an army of mujahidin that could join the global jihad and lead to the establishment of an Islamic state in Indonesia. The key to this was providing Santoso with an effective media arm, and the Lamongan network did just this, connecting Santoso first with al-Qaeda’s Global Islamic Media Front and then with ISIS. The objective was to create the illusion, both internationally and at home, that the Indonesian effort was bigger and more significant than it really was. The propagandists may have wanted international recognition for Indonesia’s homegrown jihad, but they wanted even more to persuade small-town recruits from other parts of Indonesia that Poso was a war worth fighting. Without international links, what was the attraction? The would-be mujahidin never seemed to realise how dangerous the connection to Poso was, because it was one place that had intense police surveillance. If Indonesia’s extremists had not kept trying to get to Poso, they probably could have avoided many of the crackdowns that followed. But pursuit by police was a factor in pushing several key Lamongan members to leave for Syria. Many wanted to go anyway, but the steady stream of arrests and the information they produced turmed departure into a necessity. This report takes the stories of six individuals and shows how their lives intersected to shape a pro-ISIS network in Lamongan. The six are Siswanto, the religious teacher from al-Islam; his brother-in-law, Sibghotullah, who had worked with Santoso; Dayat, a fugitive from Medan who married into a Lamongan family and became a recruiter for Poso; Arif Tuban and Arif Wicakso no alias Hendro who helped set up Santoso’s media arm; and Salim Mubarok Attamimi, a career mujahid and the only one of the six without direct links to Poso

Facebook jihad: A case study of recruitment discourses and strategies targeting a Western female

Recent years has seen a trend towards the increasing specificity of recruitment targets for global jihad. This paper is a case study of the discourses used to recruit a Western female who originally subscribed to an antigovernment, anti-New World Order ideology. Categorising using grounded theory analysis found that female recruiters tapped into the interest of their target subject and then shifted her towards sympathy and commitment to radical Islam. This was achieved through media saturation of Western aggression against Muslims coupled with an ideology that promotes the need to fight and resist. Subject material to which the recruit was directed was carefully controlled and initially deemphasized the Qur’an in favour of mujahedeen narratives and the teachings of Anwar al-Awlaki. Overall, the research supported a sophisticated narrowcasting strategy that was carefully developed primarily by female recruiters

Jihadi video and auto-radicalisation: evidence from an exploratory YouTube study

Large amounts of jihadi video content on YouTube along with the vast array of relational data that can be gathered opens up innovative avenues for exploration of the support base for political violence. This exploratory study analyses the online supporters of jihad-promoting video content on YouTube, focusing on those posting and commenting upon martyr-promoting material from Iraq. Findings suggest that a majority are under 35 years of age and resident outside the region of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) with the largest percentage of supporters located in the United States. Evidence to support the potential for online radicalisation is presented. Findings relating to newly formed virtual relationships involving a YouTube user with no apparent prior links to jihadists are discussed

Automatic Detection of Online Jihadist Hate Speech

We have developed a system that automatically detects online jihadist hate speech with over 80% accuracy, by using techniques from Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. The system is trained on a corpus of 45,000 subversive Twitter messages collected from October 2014 to December 2016. We present a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the jihadist rhetoric in the corpus, examine the network of Twitter users, outline the technical procedure used to train the system, and discuss examples of use.Comment: 31 page

Jihadism Influence In The Movement Of Radical Religious Extremism: Threat To The Sound Aqidah of Cyber Users

This research examines the radical religious extremism (RRE) movement's Salafi Jihadism and how it is contaminating Muslims' aqidah, particularly among internet users. This essay examines the idea of Salafi Jihadism, which goes against the notion of Ahl Sunnah wal Jamaah, which is considered to be the core religious conviction of Muslims worldwide, particularly in Malaysia. Given that cyber users are particularly vulnerable to exposure to and influence from Salafi Jihadism, this study aims to comprehend the implications of this ideology in light of the contemporary RRE movement, which takes advantage of the development of the internet.  This qualitative study acquired resources especially regarding the narrative of RRE movement which relates to the idea of Salafi Jihadism from printed and online materials, both from primary and secondary sources. This study found that the cyber net users are vulnerable to the RRE ideologies hence it is required to have self-resilience towards any RRE ideologies since this borderless world of the internet is uncontrollable hence posits threat to its users, especially in the weltanschauung of Muslims that adhere to Ahl Sunnah wal Jamaah

Anonymity, Membership-Length and Postage Frequency as Predictors of Extremist Language and Behaviour among Twitter Users

The rise in participation of social media networks is accompanied with a corresponding rise in online extremism. The present research was carried out to ascertain whether anonymity, membership length and postage frequency are predictors of online extremism. A total of 205 Twitter accounts and 102,290 tweets were examined. To address the research question, both a corpus linguistic analysis (CLA) and content analysis (CA) were conducted. The former looked at extreme words associated with Islam and the latter looked at four types of extremist behaviour (extreme pro-social, extreme anti-social, extreme anti-social prejudicial biases and extreme radical behaviours). Keyness tests demonstrated that extreme words were most significantly associated with Twitter accounts with high anonymity, low membership length and low postage frequency. A series of multiple regressions found that anonymity significantly predicted four types of extremist behaviour. Membership length only predicted extreme anti-social behaviour and postage frequency did not display any significant predictive power for any of the four types of extremist behaviour. These results suggest that anonymity, membership length and postage frequency differ in terms of predicting extremist language and behaviour

Another century, another long war

This report argues that Australia is involved in the early stages of a conflict that may last for the rest of the century. It considers possible solutions, approaches that could be used, and what Australia should do. Overview Australia is involved in the early stages of a conflict that may last for the rest of the century and potentially beyond. Terrorism is but a symptom of a broader conflict in which the fundamental threat is from radical Islamists who are intent on establishing Islam as the foundation of a new world order. While the violence, so far, is mostly confined to Islamic lands, some of the radicals are engaged in a direct war against Western secular nations. The home-grown threat from terror remains and is likely to worsen as radicals return from fighting overseas and the internet dumps unconstrained radical propaganda across the globe. If the caliphate in Iraq and Syria established by the Islamic State survives, it will be a worrying portent of worse to come. The paper looks at the three fronts of this conflict: the oldest and largest front, within Islam, is where Sunni Muslims are fighting Shia Muslims; the second front, again within Islam, is a modern political battle in which radical Islamists are intent on overthrowing existing governments and replacing them with new ones based on sharia law; and the third is the more recent conflict between (usually) Western states and smaller groups of radical Islamists who are motivated by a hatred of the West. It considers possible solutions, approaches that could be used, and more specifically what Australia should do