NOVEMBER 17 — The transnational militant organisation Islamic State, which has seized control of large swathes of Iraq and Syria in the past year, recently published its online magazine, Dabiq. Its articles in Arabic and several other languages including French, German, Russian and Indonesian focus on ideological and strategic narratives, unlike Al Qaeda’s Inspire magazine that contained bomb-making recipes and other terrorist instructions. Inspire and Dabiq represent two major challenges of online extremism, namely the Internet as a terrorist learning laboratory and the spread of extremist narratives to promote online radicalisation.
The spread of terrorist tradecraft online and the appearance of e-learning courses on explosives on certain extremist forums have heightened concerns about the use of the Internet as terrorist learning sources. However, the utility of online manuals is somewhat limited as they provide only abstract knowledge. Real-world training and combat experience in conflict areas such as Syria and Iraq remain the chief avenues for acquiring terrorist skills.
The value of online media as a virtual terrorist class might not be as significant as initially thought due to the limitations of terrorist online manuals. However, the Internet has been particularly useful as a propaganda tool as it allows extremists to spread their messages to a global audience on an unprecedented scale.
While preventive measures need to be implemented both online and offline, an effective counter-narrative calls for a coherent strategy comprising three key elements: The message, the messaging and the messenger.
That said, the emergence of simple, easy-to-follow manuals such as Inspire magazine’s Make A Bomb In Your Mom’s Kitchen is particularly useful to lone-actor and small-cell terrorists such as the Boston Marathon bombers. Such materials were also instrumental in the radicalisation of the bombers of Indonesia’s Cirebon police mosque and a church in Solo, Central Java. Their radicalisation into violent behaviour was also largely driven by online terrorist tradecraft that is framed and justified within jihadist narratives.
Knowing the limitation of online tradecraft, groups such as Al Qaeda aim to use it not as a replacement for real-world training, but to inspire lone-wolf terrorists and the culture of “solo terrorism”.
The Internet is a convenient propaganda tool for extremists for the following reasons. First, online media ranging from Web video to interactive forums and social media could cater to different personalities and cultural backgrounds.
Islamic State propaganda, for instance, consists of varying mixtures of humanitarian and violent elements, depending on the target audience. Messages that stress the humanitarian element of the Syrian conflict appeared to be more successful when targeting Western audiences as opposed to Arab ones that could relate more to the violence dimension.
Second, extremists have managed to establish resilient, multilingual online networks by combining various online and social media platforms. A certain Indonesian Twitter user who translates and retweets the Islamic State’s Arabic and English tweets in Bahasa Indonesia has more than 11,000 followers. These networks enable uninterrupted campaigns and constant reproduction of materials to a wider audience. Consequently, removing online extremist materials would be a pointless exercise. — TODAY
* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malay Mail Online.
