Radical Web of Islam's Terror

Here's a teaser of a good article. Click the link to read the whole thing. National Post

The world's most dangerous jihadists no longer answer to al-Qaeda. The terrorists we should fear most are self-recruited wannabes who find purpose in terror and comrades on the Web. This new generation is even more frightening and unpredictable than its predecessors, but its evolution just may reveal the key to its demise.

When British police broke down Younis Tsouli's door in a leafy west London neighbourhood in October, 2005, they suspected the 22-year-old son of a Moroccan diplomat of little more than having traded e-mails with men planning a bombing in Bosnia. It was only after they began examining the hard drive on Tsouli's computer that they realized they had stumbled upon one of the most infamous --and unlikely --cyberjihadists in the world.

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Tsouli's online username, as they discovered, was "Irhabi007" ("Terrorist007" in Arabic). It was a moniker well known to international counterterrorism officials. Since 2004, this young man, with no history of radical activity, had become one of the world's most influential propagandists in jihadi chat rooms. It had been the online images of the war in Iraq that first radicalized him. He began spending his days creating and hacking dozens of Web sites in order to upload videos of beheadings and suicide bombings in Iraq and post links to the texts of bomb-making manuals. From his bedroom in London, he eventually became a crucial global organizer of online terrorist networks, guiding others to jihadist sites where they could learn the deadly craft. Ultimately, he attracted the attention of the late leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. When British police discovered this young IT student in his London flat, he was serving as Zarqawi's public relations mouthpiece on the Web.

Tsouli's journey from computer geek to radical jihadist is representative of the wider evolution of Islamist terrorist networks today. Since Sept. 11, 2001, the threat confronting the West has changed dramatically. The enemy today is not a product of poverty, ignorance or religious brainwashing. The individuals we should fear most haven't been trained in terrorist camps, and they don't answer to Osama bin Laden or Ayman al-Zawahiri. They often do not even adhere to the most austere and dogmatic tenets of radical Islam. Instead, the new generation of terrorists consists of homegrown wannabes -- selfrecruited, without leadership and globally connected through the Internet. They are young people seeking thrills, and a sense of significance in their lives. And their lack of structure and organizing principles makes them even more terrifying and volatile than their terrorist forebears.