History of the Cyber Jihad
CYBER LITERACY SPARKED BY A LUST FOR PORNOGRAPHY
One of the more surprising features of ISIS fighters was their expansive street-level knowledge of modern Internet technology. In 2014, the average teenager had had years of hands-on experience using advanced mobile phone tools and applications. The reach and popularity of Facebook, as well as the free mobile phone Skype, led to the adoption of even more involved personal communications and social media apps like WhatsApp. WhatsApp was arguably the most popular online mobile phone app in the Eastern Hemisphere between 2010 and 2014, well before it moved to the United States.
This extreme depth of cyber knowledge by the youth in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and South Asia was invaluable for al-Qaeda; its younger generation and fanboys would be crucial to the creation of ISIS. They knew how the Internet worked, how to reach and create groups of like-minded individuals, and how to avoid the national security services. Many of their countries had cyber security agencies that monitored every keystroke from a desktop computer but could not monitor every post or exchange of data on Facebook or WhatsApp. Typically, pornography was the most transmitted data in these regions where sexual suppression was cultural. Then the gamers, kids playing Call of Duty and World of Warcraft, found they could communicate quickly, easily, and securely. Moreover, these young men could use WhatsApp to call girls or order the services of prostitutes—activities that their societies strictly prohibited. Some apps allowed them to share packages of porn, look at video streams, and easily transmit porn. The access to pornography and illicit materials was critical to the rise of the apps. Mobile phone porn was more circumspect than sitting in an Internet café trying to watch on a large screen. It was easier, cheaper, and safer to get porn on a cell phone than watching Russian and Italian live porn advertisement channels for pay-porn and cheaper than buying hacked subscription keys on the Hotbird or NileSat TV channels found in every home. For those rebelling against sexual suppression, these apps were a godsend.
Osama Bin Laden was said to have had a large stash of web pornography on his computer. So, needless to say, submission to Allah was not the full explanation of why their Internet recruiting and other activities became so pervasive and successful in spreading the messages promoting their version of what the Prophet demanded of believers. No, the spark that set off the flood of Internet activity was pornography.
Porn was not necessarily a forbidden fruit if it could lead to a greater good of spreading the ideology of al-Qaeda’s Takfirism. Takfirism is the radical and un-Islamic act of declaring a Muslim an infidel. Though enjoying porn was often considered sinful amongst the more virtuous of the terrorists, the ubiquity of pathways to many things in the digital world provided ways for male Muslims to obtain a form of absolution by watching and listening to the proliferating online Imams, or preachers. That meant that sin could be counterbalanced by piety for every good Muslim who defied their parents, watched naked men or women writhe on the Internet, and enjoyed paying for chats with nude women in Romania. They would go to very popular websites like Quran.com and Islam.org to read passages from the Quran or ask a learned scholar if what they did was wrong. Everything would be forgiven by God once the message was received from a holy man stating that all indeed was forgiven. Since the early 1990s, al-Qaeda pioneered access to dealing with lust and forgiveness for it. The cyber salvation business boomed in the Middle East and South Asia with the explosion of commercial sites (pay-per-view or stream) on the World Wide Web by 1995. With it came masses of free porn. Al-Qaeda and its radical clerics saw that young men and women needed guidance to manage their virtues and excise vice from their lives. The industry of coming closer to God was not confined to Islam or even the Takfirist extreme, but they saw this as the gateway to gaining young followers who would buy into their redefinition of Islam as being corrupted by porn, western values, and the vice of money. In their rendering, the only absolution was to learn a new version of Islam that was fostered through blood, combat, and fighting like the immediate companions of the Prophet Muhammad did in the seventh century.
As early as 2003, al-Qaeda had mapped out cyberspace as a battlefront—a place where military operations, supplications to God, and showing feats of bravery would be broadcast for the world to see for free. Additionally, it would become a primary place of covert communications, logistics, trade, and recruitment.
For every one hundred young boys watching Pornhub.com, there would be one or two who could be recruited into their ranks. That meant potentially tens of thousands in the Middle East and South Asia alone. Offering them a virtuous life, a family, weapons of war, and a mission would give even the most restless losers a place in life. Al-Qaeda started this early. By the mid-1990s, radical clergy began transmitting data from underground mosques and groups to like-minded individuals using the Casio F91watch.
Soon after, they spread their message using VHS cassette tapes, soon followed by the DVD, then the digitally transferred mp3 audio clip. AQ became quite adept at adapting to new media for the transmission of its message. Most were innocuous, like lectures from extremist clerics, many of which sounded mainstream. But the 1996 video clip of the beheading of Russian Army soldier Yevgeny Rodionov was the first arguably globally disseminated jihadist extremist video that burned its way across cyberspace. In a video titled Unknown Russian Soldier, Rodionov’s throat slitting was so popular in cyberspace that al-Qaeda would come to do it again as an organizational policy when it had the chance. In the years that followed the execution of Rodionov, al-Qaeda was harnessing the power of the web using encrypted communications, browsers that hid the IP address of the sender’s location and steganography, and the embedding of encrypted messages into photographs. The 9/11 hijackers are believed to have used a variety of data transmission methodologies as well as face-to-face meetings and traditional tradecraft to communicate. They made the most spectacular media of all, the hijacking and mass murder of 2,977 people when they smashed their airplanes into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon.
Al-Qaeda’s chance to match the video power of the Rodionov clip came when the American journalist Daniel Pearl was kidnapped in Karachi, Pakistan, in 2002. Working for the Wall Street Journal, he was abducted and personally beheaded on videotape, allegedly by Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh (though some investigations say Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the 9/11 attack planner, confessed to the murder). The recording was coordinated by the mastermind of the Kenya and Tanzania bombings, Saif al-Adel. His video would be entitled The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl. It was one thing to fly airplanes into a skyscraper, but a more intimate horror, one that affected the watcher personally, was when they showed a man being slaughtered like a goat and then they held his bleeding head aloft.
When the US invasion of Iraq occurred, the newest group of al-Qaeda, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda in Iraq, quickly adopted and mastered the art of the video media blood spectacular. An American citizen and part-time drifter, Nick Berg, was kidnapped out of a hotel in Baghdad and personally beheaded by Zarqawi. His video was entitled Abu Musab al-Zarqawi Slaughters an American.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq would come to typify versions of what we call Terror Shock Value (TSV) video. Designed to shock, mortify, and instill absolute fear in its enemies, AQI mastered it between 2003 and 2011 against the US Army. They beheaded, eviscerated, shot hostages in the head, set people on fire, and showed helicopters being shot down and survivors being shot dead while their executioners laughed. It was spectacle macabre 24-7-365 in AQI’s domain.
As we wrote in our treatise on jihadist groups, Defeating ISIS, any differences in their way of producing the shock media was significant between 2004 and the massacres of 2014:
The huge difference in response between the 2004 execution of Nick Berg, for instance, and the death of James Foley ten years later, came by only adding a few changes to the original media style. The first change was to the venue. Zarqawi’s’ was in a basement and took the visage of a murdering trapped rat. ISIS subsequently conducted their murders outdoors in what they claimed was liberated land in a holy caliphate. They showed no fear of being caught or attacked from the air. The ISIS videos implied freedom to execute at will. The second change was that ISIS managed to get the victim to recite their message to the target audience, his people, and world leaders. The third change was to select a native speaker from the victim’s region of the world. Using Mohammed Emwazi or “Jihadi John” to speak in English and carry out the beheadings had a powerful impact. Having him speak eloquent English and directly threaten the Western world caused a level of political emotional outrage that the murder of Nick Berg had not.1
By 2004, Osama Bin Laden himself would question the media value of these grisly productions. The transmission of them proved that the Western press would show almost anything. The more brutal the better. But a man who styled himself as following the teachings of the way of the Prophet Muhammad didn’t believe that his group could continue to recruit with mayhem. Organized mass murder would be the most salient feature on the leading edge of his takeover of Islam. And he asked his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri to keep killing the disbelivers, the kufar, but to tone down the videotaping of their beheadings.
But Zarqawi continued to make and distribute such horrific videos right up to his death. His successors in 2005, Abu Ayyub al-Masri and Abu Umar al-Baghdadi, kept up the production of combat videos, but beheadings were minimally displayed. When they died at the hands of the US Army Rangers and Iraqi Special Forces, their successor, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a former US prisoner of war, would remember how successful Zarqawi had been and harnessed the newest forms of media to return to the good old days of blood spectacle. He would change the name of al-Qaeda in Iraq to the Islamic State of Iraq and create a new brand of horror at which God Himself would cringe.
CYBER BATTLESPACE FROM AL-QAEDA IN IRAQ TO THE ISLAMIC STATE OF IRAQ
By 2011, the web as battlefield became increasingly more important to both of the core missions of ISIS. The terror value was becoming a major part of the planning cycle and forecasting how the enemy forces would behave when they attacked. But manpower was key to implementing Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s plans. More fighters were encouraged to come to Iraq, and, as the Syrian civil war started to spread, there were new battlefields to win. Cyberspace, al-Baghdadi was told, was America’s gift to the Islamic State of Iraq’s (and now the Levant or al-Sham or ISIS) global recruiting and communication structure. Fighters would not just come from around the world; they could stay at home while supporting, fundraising, and, eventually, carrying out operations to support a worldwide struggle. Iraq and Syria’s jihad would be a global one directed through the virtual world of a laptop or mobile phone.
Terrorist groups have long known how to exploit all available technology options and continue to engage in overt and covert activity on the web using off-the-shelf but sophisticated tech gear—and the best off-the-shelf tool for communication in the world is the Internet. This allows organizations such as ISIS to project their power beyond physical borders. Al-Qaeda mouthpiece Ayman al-Zawahiri long has stated that he believes a large part of the violent jihad was going to be waged by skillfully using the media. Little did he know how right he would be.
Neither al-Qaeda nor ISIS pioneered harnessing jihadist warfare in the cyber information space. That honor would go to the Palestinians during the second Palestinian Intifada in 2000, or the al-Aqsa Intifada. This uprising in the Palestinian territories started with a visit to the holy Muslim temple mount by the former General Ariel Sharon. This sparked mass rioting and killings of both Palestinians and Israeli soldiers. In response, many Palestinians living abroad started attacking Israelis in cyberspace. They used relatively simple tools to deface Israeli government websites. The Israelis retaliated, and thus began the Electronic Intifada, which continues to this day. Anti-Israeli Lebanese Shiite Muslims of Hezbollah started their own cyber war offensive and called it the Cyber Intifada. However, these attacks were generally basic hacks that barely scratched the surface.
Al-Qaeda was watching and recognized the propaganda value of the cyber attacks through hacking as well as the importance of maintaining the secrecy and security of communication. But propaganda dissemination was going to be priority one.
Al-Qaeda quickly established a network of volunteers, both in their bases and around the Muslim world, to produce and distribute materials for the followers. AQ founded media centers including al-Fajr and As-Sahab (“the Clouds”), the Global Islamic Media Front (GIMF), and an array of other media operations that fell under this umbrella organization. AQ used regional centers for more focused coverage in vital areas of activity. Al-Malahim, named after the Islamic book of Battles (Slaughter), was the media outlet for al-Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) that started in the cities of Saudi Arabia and ended up in exile in Yemen. Al-Andalus or Andalusia, the home of the golden age of Islam, was the name of media outlet for al-Qaeda of the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) in North Africa and the sub-Saharan Africans. Each of these organizations developed their own style of narrating the story of honorable jihadist war and romance—and their distribution networks did the rest. Other groups assisted with translation or distribution.
At one point around 2010, according to a report from the terrorism research group the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), the four main jihadist media networks were outperformed by al-Qaeda affiliates like the Global Islamic Media Front (GIMF). These affiliates are responsible for publishing propaganda and for developing some of al-Qaeda’s messaging and encryption apps. But right behind them was the newcomer to the game, al-Furqan, the group run by Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda organization in Iraq.2
Over the first decade of the twenty-first century, al-Qaeda learned, understood, and weaponized the power of releasing cyber chaos. The group made good use of this time. In 2007, al-Qaeda’s global webmaster who went by the handle “Irhabi007” (Arabic for Terrorist 007), Younis Tsouli, a 23-year-old, Moroccan-born British man, was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in prison in the UK. Paying much less attention to his two accomplices, Tariq al-Daour and Waseem Mughal, the British media quickly dubbed Tsouli the “Jihadist James Bond.” Tsouli and his partners distributed a wide range of AQ video murders, handbooks for making car bombs, and suicide explosive belts.3 By 2012, al-Qaeda would make a public call for its own Palestinian E-Intifada-like global “Electronic Jihad.”4 Any al-Qaeda fanboy or E-Jihadist who could not make it to the global battlefield was to dedicate his efforts to disrupting the West’s computer networks and systems from the comfort of his home.
The AQ hacking groups were and continue to be at best engaged what could be described as cyber graffiti. They deface websites and other low-level targets. The hacking tool kits they employed were simple, but they lacked organization, man power, and a history of scored victories. Al-Qaeda announced the establishment of the Electronic Jihad through a video. In the video, the main speaker discussed US cyber vulnerabilities and exhorted a “covert mujahideen”5 to organize and launch cyber attacks against the United States and the West. In July of the same year, US officials confirmed there was evidence that al-Qaeda was seeking to recruit Arab members of the global cyber “hacktivist” group Anonymous in order to build an al-Qaeda hacker collective of their own.6
Al-Qaeda organized several different groups including the official AQ Electronic Jihad Organization (Tanzim Al Qaedat al-Jihad al-Electroniyya), led by Yahya al-Nemr (Jonathan the Lion), who was previously related to other amateur groups including the Iraqi Electronic Forces (Qwat al-electriniyaa al-Iraq), the Holy War Hackers Team (Team Al-Hackers Al-Mujahidin), and the al-Mareek Media Arm. He was an Iraqi who lived in Egypt and was last known to be living in Afghanistan. The extent of his operations involved simple defacements of websites.
Many of these al-Qaeda hacking and E-graffiti efforts were spearheaded by the young men who filled the ranks of al-Qaeda in Iraq. But another group would soon join them: the sons and daughters of the ex-Baathist Iraqis who lost their livelihoods after the fall of Saddam. They, too, knew how to use the web, their mobile phones, and the deepest parts of the Internet to send forth a message that would strike simultaneously with their military offensive to seize and capture both Iraq and Syria. They would become the electronic swords of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). The Cyber soldiers of the Caliphate.