The next Generation of Terror

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When British police broke down Younis Tsouli’s door in October 2005 in a leafy west London neighborhood, they suspected the 22-year-old college student, the son of a Moroccan diplomat, of little more than having traded e-mails with men planning a bombing in Bosnia. It was only after they began examining his hard drive that they realised they had stumbled upon one of the most infamous – and unlikely – cyberjihadists in the world. Tsouli’s online username, as they discovered, was Irhabi007 (“Terrorist007” in Arabic). It was a moniker well known to international counterterrorism officials. Since 2004, this young man, with no history of radical activity, had become one of the world’s most influential propagandists in jihadi chatrooms. It had been the online images of the war in Iraq that first radicalised him. He began spending his days creating and hacking dozens of Web sites to upload videos of beheadings and suicide bombings in Iraq and post links to the texts of bomb-making manuals. From his bedroom in London, he eventually became a crucial global organiser of online terrorist networks, guiding others to jihadist sites where they could learn their deadly craft. Ultimately, he attracted the attention of the late leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. When British police discovered him in his London flat, he was serving as Zarqawi’s PR mouthpiece on the Web.

Tsouli’s journey is representative of the wider evolution of Islamist terrorist networks today. Since Sept. 11, 2001, the threat confronting the West has changed dramatically. The enemy today is not a product of poverty, ignorance, or religious brainwashing. The individuals we should fear most haven’t been trained in terrorist camps, and don’t answer to Osama bin Laden or Ayman al-Zawahiri. They often do not even adhere to the most austere and dogmatic tenets of radical Islam. Instead, these are homegrown wannabes – self-recruited, without leadership, and globally connected through the Internet. And their lack of structure and organising principles makes them even more terrifying and volatile than their terrorist forebears. the new face of terror

The five years between Osama bin Laden’s 1996 declaration of war against the US from his safe haven in Afghanistan to the attacks of 9/11 were the “golden age” of what could be called al Qaeda Central. Those days are long over, but the social movement they inspired is as strong and dangerous as ever.

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2008

An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

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