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Terrorism.com
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How does al-Qaida stay organised when its members are in hiding and
scattered across the world? Easy - it runs a website, says Paul Eedle
Paul Eedle
Wednesday July 17, 2002
The Guardian
For a secret organisation hunted by the intelligence services of the most
powerful nations on earth, al-Qaida has a remarkably public face. It is a
website run by the Centre for Islamic Studies and Research. Since the start
of the war on terrorism, the site has been producing hundreds of pages of
material to rally support among radical Muslims, scare the west and enable
al-Qaida cells to operate independently of Osama bin Laden and other leaders
now in hiding.
The site is entirely in Arabic, which means that tens of millions of people
who hate American policies on the Middle East can read it, but almost nobody
in either the governments or the media of the west can understand a word.
The website is central to al-Qaida's strategy to ensure that its war with
the US will continue even if many of its cells across the world are broken
up and its current leaders are killed or captured. The site's function is to
deepen and broaden worldwide Muslim support, allowing al-Qaida or successor
organisations to fish for recruits, money and political backing.
The whole thrust of the site, from videos glorifying September 11 to Islamic
legal arguments justifying the killing of civilians, and even poetry, is to
convince radical Muslims that, for decades, the US has been waging a war to
destroy Islam, and that they must fight back. "America is the cause of every
injustice, every wrong, every tyranny that afflicts Muslims... It is steeped
in the blood of Muslims," wrote Sulaiman Bu Ghaith, an al-Qaida spokesman,
in a series of articles published on the site last month entitled Under the
Shadow of Spears. "America does not understand dialogue. Nor peaceful
coexistence. Nor appeals, nor condemnation, nor criticism. America will only
be stopped by blood."
The site works to maintain the morale of al-Qaida supporters in the face of
obvious reverses since September 11. In a letter to "brother mojahedin
everywhere" in late May, Bu Ghaith warned: "My dear brothers: the path of
principles and prayers is surrounded by calamities and obstacles, full of
dangers and misfortunes, prison, death, banishment and exile. One day the
believers are victorious over the infidels, the next day the infidels are
victorious over the believers. Victory will never be the ally of either
side, although definitely in the end the believers will triumph."
He repeated the message in an audio recording on the site late last month.
He also warned of new attacks on the US and promised a television appearance
soon by Bin Laden. The story topped world headlines when the satellite TV
channel al-Jazeera broadcast the recording, although it did not mention the
website as the original source. Al-Qaida has also been using the site to
launch diatribes against Muslims who question its strategy of total war with
America.
Although there is deep, broad anger in the Muslim world against US policies,
there has been a surprising amount of criticism of al-Qaida from radicals
who were once its allies and even its religious mentors. Shaykh Salman
al-Oadah, for instance, who was admired by Bin Laden as one of the two
religious leaders of Saudi Arabia's opposition movement in the mid-1990s,
condemned the September 11 attacks for killing civilians. In April, he
coordinated an open letter by 150 Saudi intellectuals entitled How We Can
Coexist, calling for a dialogue with the west. Muntasser al-Zayyat, a lawyer
for Egypt's radical Islamic Group, part of which merged with al-Qaida in the
90s, criticised al-Qaida for releasing a video featuring one of the
September 11 hijackers explaining his motives for martyrdom at a time when
Israeli-Palestinian violence was at its peak in April. He said the video,
broadcast by al-Jazeera, diverted attention from the Palestinian issue and
risked alienating potential supporters of the Palestinian cause in the west.
Al-Qaida reacted furiously with a deluge of polemic on its website defending
the entire conduct of its war against the west and dismissing any approach
to the west other than violence. One statement on the subject of "the
legality of the operations in Washington and New York" laid out seven
grounds in Islamic law on which it is permissible to kill "sacrosanct
infidels" - essentially civilians - and six grounds on which it is
permissible to kill Muslims.
These polemics explain why the site is so important to al-Qaida and why the
real action in radical Muslim politics is now in a jungle of websites,
bulletin boards, email lists and chatrooms on the internet. Al-Qaida knows
it has to engage people there if it is to dominate debate.
The Centre for Islamic Studies and Research website is a substantial
undertaking. It has 11 sections, including the centre's own reports of
fighting in Afghanistan, a regular digest of world media coverage of the
conflict, books of jihad theology to download, videos such as the hijacker's
testament, information about prisoners held in Pakistan and Guantanamo Bay,
and poetry about jihad.
The site has been hosted by legitimate internet service providers in
Malaysia and, more recently, the US, at addresses such as www.alneda.com and
www.drasat.com. The site has been shut down three times, each time because
CNN was researching a story about the site and emailed the ISP for comment.
As soon as the ISPs realised what they were hosting, they closed it. The
site is now offline, but it is of such importance to al-Qaida that it is
likely to try to find a new way to publish it.
There has been media speculation that the site is being used to direct
al-Qaida operational cells, and it has certainly carried low-level
operational information. In February it published the names and home phone
numbers of 84 al-Qaida fighters captured by Pakistan after their escape from
fighting in Afghanistan, presumably with the aim that sympathisers would
contact their families and let them know they were alive.
More broadly, the site supports al-Qaida's effort since the war in
Afghanistan to disperse its forces and enable them to operate independently.
It provides all the strategic guidance, theological argument and moral
inspiration - in a word, leadership - that a cell of trained al-Qaida
operatives would need to plan an attack on western targets.
A statement signed by Qaidat al-Jihad ("the Base of Jihad", al-Qaida's
official name), published on the site in April, said: "God has enabled
al-Qaida by his grace to reorganise its ranks, distribute its forces and
arrange cooperation with the Afghan mojahedin. Serious work has begun inside
Afghanistan. As for work abroad against the Americans and the Jews, matters
have been arranged so that if one link is removed, however large its
organisational importance, the organisation will not be struck by fatal
blows, for new units have been formed..."
Whether Bin Laden, al-Qaida's Egyptian theorist Ayman al-Zawahiri and their
colleagues are on a mountain in the Hindu Kush or living with their beards
shaved off in a suburb of Karachi no longer matters to the organisation.
They can inspire and guide a worldwide movement without physically meeting
their followers - without even knowing who they are.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002
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