KUALA LUMPUR, March 29 — Islamic State (IS) recruiters are gaining traction in Malaysia’s cyberspace and may negate authorities’ progress in tracking down and arresting militants in the real world, said a terrorism researcher from Singapore.
In a piece published by The Straits Times today, the researcher from the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) told Putrajaya that it would be folly to discount the dangers of a “Cyber ISIS” forming among Malaysians.
Muhammad Haziq Jani said that while Malaysian law enforcement were aware of such activities within the realms of social media, they must direct their attention further upstream where the ideology of the Islamic State supporters and recruiters were percolating into an “online ribat”.
“In non-military usage, ribat means a building prepared and put aside for ritualistic, academic and educational activities of the fuqaha (scholars of jurisprudence) and the Sufis. Ribat in this sense may be linked to jihad but only in the non-violent and symbolic sense, that is, against ‘the self’.
“Through the evolution of its use by Muslim armies in warfare in the past centuries, ribat has been supplied with the notion of the ‘frontier’ that was injected by the period of conquests in Islamic history,” he explained.
This concept in the modern setting meant laying the groundwork: intelligence-gathering, battle-readiness, and possibly religious indoctrination.
Muhammad Haziq did not provide estimates for extent of the problem, but said the online extremists count among their numbers IS sympathisers and would-be fighters who could not afford to leave for Syria or have yet to build up enough courage to do so.
In lieu of actually fighting alongside other IS militants in the Middle East, they instead expend efforts in spreading the jihadist message among the Malay-speaking community and vicariously living the battle by following Malaysian murabitun (extremists) such as the late Lotfi Ariffin who made it to Syria.
In their perceived online warfare, the cyber extremists work to further the message through social media and social engineering as well as circumventing authorities’ efforts to shut down accounts online.
“Since 2013, the online murabitun followed the journey of extremists such as Lotfi Ariffin, producing and distributing extremist content, from the daily lives of fighters in Syria to calls for jihad and even material such as logos, pictures and videos from ‘ISIS Central’.
Such efforts have resulted in the IS message completely co-opting the Malaysian version of jihad, and educating the audience — both willing as well as inadvertent — about the world of IS, teaching Malaysian how think, speak, act and even dress as militants.
They also form a pseudo-support group that allows budding militant aspirations to be nurtured into real-world action, a community that celebrates IS victories and mourns the deaths of extremists, and eventually giving rise to those who would replace the IS fallen.
“Online murabitun with dangerous levels of radicalisation should not be left alone just because they are not an immediate threat. Those who have yet to be dangerously radicalised need to be rescued and guided back into society for their own safety and for the security of Malaysia,” he concluded.
In 2014, Malay Mail Online reported of the accelerating spread of militant ideology online via social networks, which the police’s anti-terror division said would be difficult to counter due to their ubiquity and ease of use.
Since then, the online militancy has increasingly resulted in planned terrorist action in the real world here, culminating in the growing number of arrests police have made, most recently that of 15 people allegedly planning to attack Malaysian targets.
Worryingly for Malaysia and the rest of the world is that IS is increasingly adopting terrorist attacks across the world, as its insurgency in Syria loses ground to joint military forces seeking to destroy the terrorist group.
The group claimed responsibility to the Paris, France attacks in November that killed 137 people and injured nearly 400 more as well as the latest bombings in Brussels, Belgium in which 35 people died and over 300 were hurt.
Both attacks led to authorities worldwide, including Malaysia, raising alert levels in precaution. Malaysia is now also setting up anti-terrorism divisions in every state.
