The Internet has long been used by terrorist organizations, but recently, terrorists have increasingly exploited it for recruitment purposes. On December 9, five Muslim-American men from the Washington, D.C. area were arrested in Pakistan after allegedly wanting to train in terrorist camps. This begs the question, how do five men, between the ages of 19 to 25, become so radicalized that they drop everything and fly to Pakistan to wage jihad?
Initial reports state that the Internet played a prominent role in the radicalization of these men. The FBI said that the social networking sites Facebook and YouTube were prominent tools in linking this group to extremists in Pakistan. Usman Anwar, the police chief of Sargodha, the city in which the group was captured, described their Internet activities:
The five men bonded together in the jihadi cause, watching jihadist video clips on YouTube that showed attacks by the Taliban on allied forces in Afghanistan. The group also maintained a common e-mail address. Employing a technique widely used among militants, they left their comments in the “draft” box of the e-mail address so that they could all easily read the comments.
Thus far, it is unclear if the group from DC was going to be accepted by the training camps in Pakistan. In October, a man from Boston, also radicalized by the Internet, went to Yemen only to be rejected by the terrorists.
Terrorist groups assume a degree of risk in this recruitment process, as they do not know if they are recruiting disillusioned Muslim-Americans or CIA agents. There are advantages though, to disseminating messages via the Internet. Encouraging people already residing in the West to attempt to carry out small acts of terrorism diverts resources away from larger plots brewing abroad. Additionally, if the terrorists do accept an outsider into their ranks, that person would most likely be a “clean skin,” someone without any previous criminal record and accustomed to operating in a Western setting.
The question still yet to be answered is why many disillusioned Muslims are drawn to the Internet. Psychiatrist and former CIA officer, Marc Sageman, posed one interesting theory:
The Internet provides confused young Muslims with a virtual community. Those who cannot adapt to their new homes discover on the Internet a responsive and compassionate forum. The Internet stands in for the idea of the ummah, the mythologized Muslim community. The Internet makes this ideal community concrete, because one can interact with it. [T]his virtual ummah [compares] to romantic conceptions of nationhood, which inspire people not only to love their country but to die for it.
With no reason to believe that terrorist recruiting on the Internet will disappear, it is important for counter-terrorist agencies to continue to be vigilant of these efforts to recruit Americans. In the coming weeks we will profile the use of other social networking tools, such as Second Life, and how they have been utilized by terrorist organizations.
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No, it does not “beg the question”. To “beg the question” is to assume the conclusion in the premise.
If I assert that “hunters are dangerous to wildlife”, I am “begging the question”, because the very definition of a hunter is someone who kills wild animals.
It would be more correct to write “raises the question”.