WASHINGTON - In the snow-draped mountains near Jalalabad in November 2001, as the Taliban collapsed and Al-Qaida lost its Afghan sanctuary, Osama bin Laden biographer Hamid Mir watched ``every second Al-Qaida member carrying a laptop computer along with a Kalashnikov'' as they prepared to scatter into hiding and exile. On the computer screens were photographs of Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta.
Nearly four years later, Al-Qaida has become the first guerrilla movement in history to migrate from physical space to cyberspace. With laptops and DVDs, in hide-outs and at neighborhood Internet cafes, young code-writing jihadists have sought to replicate the training, communication, planning and preaching facilities they lost in Afghanistan with countless new locations on the Internet.
Al-Qaida suicide bombers and ambush units in Iraq routinely depend on the Web for training and tactical support, relying on the Internet's anonymity and flexibility to operate with near impunity in cyberspace. In Qatar, Egypt and Europe, cells affiliated with Al-Qaida that have recently carried out or seriously planned bombings have relied heavily on the Internet.
Such cases have led Western intelligence agencies and outside terrorism specialists to conclude that the ``global jihad movement,'' sometimes led by Al-Qaida fugitives but increasingly made up of diverse ``groups and ad hoc cells,'' has become a ``Web directed'' phenomenon, as a presentation for U.S. government terrorism analysts by longtime State Department expert Dennis Pluchinsky put it.
Hampered by the nature of the Internet itself, the government has proven ineffective at blocking or even hindering significantly this vast online presence.
Online library
• Expertise on subjects found in many
languages
Among other things, Al-Qaida and its offshoots are building a massive and dynamic online library of training materials -- some supported by experts who answer questions on message boards or in chat rooms -- covering such varied subjects as how to mix ricin poison, how to make a bomb from commercial chemicals, how to pose as a fisherman and sneak through Syria into Iraq, how to shoot at a U.S. soldier, and how to navigate by the stars while running through a night-shrouded desert.
These materials are cascading across the Web in Arabic, Urdu, Pashto and other first languages of jihadist volunteers.
The Saudi Arabian branch of Al-Qaida launched an online magazine in 2004 that exhorted potential recruits to use the Internet: ``Oh Mujahid brother, in order to join the great training camps you don't have to travel to other lands,'' declared the inaugural issue of Muaskar al-Battar, or Camp of the Sword. ``Alone, in your home or with a group of your brothers, you too can begin to execute the training program.''
``Biological Weapons'' was the stark title of a 15-page Arabic-language document posted two months ago on the Web site of Al-Qaida fugitive leader Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, one of the jihadist movement's most important propagandists, often referred to by the nom de guerre Abu Musab Suri.
His document described ``how the pneumonic plague could be made into a biological weapon,'' if a small supply of the virus could be acquired, according to a translation by Rebecca Givner-Forbes, an analyst at the Terrorism Research Center, in Arlington, Va.
Nasar's guide drew on U.S. and Japanese biological weapons programs from the World War II era and showed ``how to inject carrier animals, like rats, with the virus and how to extract microbes from infected blood . . . and how to dry them so that they can be used with an aerosol delivery system.''
Jihadists seek to overcome in cyberspace specific obstacles they face from armies and police forces in the physical world. In planning attacks, radical operatives are often at risk when they congregate at a mosque or cross a border with false documents. They are safer working on the Web.
Al-Qaida and its offshoots ``have understood that both time and space have in many ways been conquered by the Internet,'' said John Arquilla, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey who coined the term ``netwar'' more than a decade ago.
Al-Qaida's innovation on the Web ``erodes the ability of our security services to hit them when they're most vulnerable, when they're moving,'' said Michael Scheuer, former chief of the CIA unit that tracked bin Laden.
``It used to be they had to go to Sudan, they had to go to Yemen, they had to go to Afghanistan to train,'' he said. Now, even when such travel is necessary, an Al-Qaida operative ``no longer has to carry anything that's incriminating. He doesn't need his schematics, he doesn't need his blueprints, he doesn't need formulas.''
Everything is posted on the Web or ``can be sent ahead by encrypted Internet, and it gets lost in the billions of messages that are out there.''
The number of active jihadist-related Web sites has metastasized since Sept. 11, 2001. When Gabriel Weimann, a professor at the University of Haifa in Israel, began tracking terrorist-related Web sites eight years ago, he found 12; today, he tracks more than 4,500. Hundreds of them celebrate Al-Qaida or its ideas, he said.
``The Internet is the network that connects them all,'' Weimann said. ``You can see the virtual community come alive.''
Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq more than two years ago, the Web's growth as a jihadist meeting and training ground has accelerated. The war has become a clarion call for globally dispersed Islamist radicals. It has also led Al-Qaida to place vast amounts of specific terrorist training material online to support its recruitment and fighting in the field.
The Web's shapeless disregard for national boundaries and ethnic markers fits exactly with bin Laden's original vision for Al-Qaida, which he founded to stimulate revolt among the worldwide Muslim ummah, or community of believers.
Bin Laden's appeal among some Muslims has long flowed in part from his rare willingness among Arab leaders to surround himself with racially and ethnically diverse followers, to ignore ancient prejudices and national borders. In this sense of utopian ambition, the Web has become a gathering place for a rainbow coalition of jihadists.
It offers Al-Qaida ``a virtual sanctuary'' on a global scale, Rand Corp. terrorism specialist Bruce Hoffman said. ``The Internet is the ideal medium for terrorism today: anonymous but pervasive.''
Al-Qaida's main communications vehicle after Sept. 11 was Alneda.com, a clearinghouse for new statements from bin Laden's leadership group as his grip on Afghan territory crumbled. An archive of the site, also obtained by the Washington Post from an experienced researcher, includes a library of pictures from the 2001 Afghan war, along with a collage of news accounts, long theological justifications for jihad, and celebrations of the Sept. 11 hijackers.
The Web master and chief propagandist of the site has been identified by Western analysts as Yusuf Ayiri, a Saudi cleric and onetime Al-Qaida instructor in Afghanistan. In the summer of 2002, volunteer campaigners who were trying to shut him down, as well as U.S. authorities, chased him across multiple computer servers.
At one point, a pornographer gained control of the Alneda.com domain name, and the site shifted to servers in Malaysia, then Texas, then Michigan. Ayiri died in a gunbattle with Saudi security forces in May 2003. His site ultimately disappeared.
Rather than one successor, there were hundreds.
Nomadic presence
• Web anonymity shrouds Al-Qaida, its
affiliates
Realizing that fixed Internet sites had become too vulnerable, Al-Qaida and its affiliates turned to rapidly proliferating jihadist bulletin boards and Internet sites that offered free upload services where files could be stored. The outside attacks on sites like Alneda.com ``forced the evolution of how jihadists are using the Internet to a more anonymous, more protected, more nomadic presence,'' said Ben N. Venzke, a U.S. government consultant whose firm IntelCenter monitors the sites.
``The groups gave up on set sites and posted messages on discussion boards -- the perfect synergy. Now they post announcements on discussion boards and link to 20 or 30 download sites. The beauty of it is, there's no one fixed site to go after.''
One of the best-known forums that emerged after Sept. 11 was Qalah, or Fortress. Registered to an address in Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates, the site has been hosted in the United States by a Houston Internet provider, Everyone's Internet, that has also hosted a number of sites preaching radical Islam. Researchers who follow the site believe it may be connected to Saad Faqih, a leading Saudi dissident living in exile in Britain. They note that the same contact information is given for his acknowledged Web site and Qalah. Faqih has denied any link.
The forum abruptly shut down July 7, hours after a posting asserted responsibility for the London transit bombings that day in the name of the previously unknown Secret Organization of Al-Qaida in Europe.
Until recently, Al-Qaida's use of the Web appeared to be centered on communications: preaching, recruiting, community building and inciting. But there is increasing evidence that Al-Qaida and its offshoots are also using the Internet for tactical purposes, especially for training new adherents.
``If you want to conduct an attack, you will find what you need on the Internet,'' said Rita Katz, director of the SITE Institute, a group that monitors and tracks the jihadist Internet sites.
Servers vulnerable
• Web masters steal space to evade
opponents
Jarret Brachman, director of research at West Point's Combating Terrorism Center, said he recently found on the Internet a 1,300-page treatise by Nasar, the Spanish- and English-speaking Al-Qaida leader who has long trained operatives in poison techniques. The book urged a campaign of media ``resistance'' waged on the Internet and implored prospective fighters to study computers along with the Koran so they could use the Internet to foster a ``culture of preparation'' with training programs.
The Nasar book was posted anonymously on the hijacked server of a U.S. business, a tactic typical of online jihadist propagandists, whose Web masters steal space from vulnerable servers worldwide and hop from Web address to Web address to evade the campaigners against Al-Qaida who seek to shut down their sites.
The movement has also innovated with great creativity to protect its most secret communications. Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, a key planner of the Sept. 11 attacks later arrested in Pakistan, used what four researchers familiar with the technique called an electronic or virtual ``dead drop'' on the Web to avoid having his e-mails intercepted by eavesdroppers in the United States or allied governments.
Mohammad or his operatives would open an account on a free, public e-mail service such as Hotmail, write a message in draft form, save it as a draft, then transmit the e-mail account name and password during chatter on a relatively secure message board, according to these researchers.
The intended recipient could then open the e-mail account and read the draft -- because no e-mail message was sent, there was a reduced risk of interception, the researchers said.
Matt Devost, president of the Terrorism Research Center, who has done research in the field for a decade, recalled that ``silverbullet'' was one of the passwords Mohammad reportedly used during this period. Sending fake streams of e-mail spam to disguise a single targeted message is another innovation used by jihadist communicators, specialists said.
Al-Qaida's success with such tactics has underscored the difficulty of gathering intelligence against the movement. Mohammad's e-mails, once discovered, ``were the best actionable intelligence in the whole war'' against bin Laden and his adherents, said Arquilla, the Naval Postgraduate School professor. But Al-Qaida has been keenly aware of its electronic pursuers at the National Security Agency and elsewhere and has tried to do what it can to stay ahead -- in particular by adopting encryption wherever possible.
``Al-Qaida and their affiliates all use very strong encryptions,'' Arquilla said. ``The enemy encrypts everything.''