It is a major concern now in Western Counter terror circle. Large chunks of funding have been channelized to
track, translate and thwart jihadi plans before they unleash any mayhem. However, it was non existent in US, UK and Europe before 9/11 and it is now under debate in South Asia and SE Asia. Of course fellow CTBlogger and expert Evan F. Kholman has observed earlier in his work(s) [e.g in “
The Real Online Terrorist Threat” Foreign Affairs, Sept/Oct 2006] that even CIA and FBI leaderships gave internet a second thought in their activities in the past. But however, they have mended their misgivings soon after. Also works and observations of
Gabriel Weimann (Haifa University Professor, Israel) on
Online Jihad are noteworthy and kind of path breaking in this regard.
Early last month I had a chance to be part of a discussion on Online Jihad movement, in New Delhi [at a
Government funded think tank (April 04:
Jihadi Propaganda in Cyberspace]. The deliberation largely focused on the global scenario and how India is vulnerable, who are the players and potential outfits that pose a threat to India and is there an online threat lurking or not in the subcontinent. Though the threat has been acknowledged in the forum, the larger threat is either overlooked or underestimated as the region is yet to witness this kind of development in cyberspace and largely on the premise that Arabic language Jihadi portals won’t have much impact in the Hindi, Urdu and Bengali speaking Jihadi elements (from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh). The discussions though touched upon many issues regarding the online threat, possible actors, target groups and last but the least regarding how to monitor and map these phenomenon. Most part of it agreed on the DOS format IP address tracking, to use Alexa.com and Ranking.com to find out Unique users, visting sessions and page views and most importantly geographic locations (physical distribution of memberships/visitors) where most of the hits are coming.
Coincidentaly, when these discussion and brain stormings were underway in Delhi, there has been one important work going on in Singapore which later published as a three page commentary. I would like to highlight Rebecca Givner-Forbes and Clay Shwery’s paper on
Mapping the Electronic Jihad (Originally published on April 25, 2007 in RSIS, Singapore). The authors have carried out analysis using Alexa.com’s tools and reached the conclusion that bulk of visits to jihadi websites come from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region (with 78 per cent) than previously speculated European countries (4.8 percent), where there are large Muslim Diaspora communities with high internet penetration. The generated data also indicated at least forty(40) countries around the globe have some percentage (even if negligible) of representation. However, they didnt provide information on the 10 most influential and important jihadi web forums used in the research.
Although the authors gave a description of ‘intensity of users’ and accepted the limitation of this tool admitting the data derived from the Alexa analysis cannot be precise. Nevertheless, as rightly mentioned elsewhere in the paper, it truly provides some sort of image of these growing virtual jihadi communities.
