New Islamist websites seek to recruit women

2007-08-30

Despite efforts to monitor and counter internet sites designed to recruit and train terrorists, sites continue to appear on the web, including those targeting female jihadists.

By Jamel Arfaoui for Magharebia in Tunis – 30/08/2007

[rezgar.com] Gharbi has been following 20 websites directed towards Muslim women.

In a study published in Tunisia's Le Temps last week, religious scholar Dr. Iqbal Gharbi said the number of websites devoted to female Jihad has increased, along with their forms and amount of content.

Gharbi, professor of religious anthropology at the Zitouna Institute, identified four general functions the sites aim to achieve: distance learning, dissemination of the Salafist call, mobilisation and terrorism on the Internet.

Gharbi, who has been tracking 20 websites directed towards Muslim women, said, "Islamists have accelerated the use of the Internet, which is the symbol of Western technology, and more precisely of US technology, which they continuously criticize. However, the pragmatic approach which allowed for the use of this Western means has proved its validity and has had a lot of benefits." According to Gharbi, one of the most important benefits to Islamist groups is that they no longer require geographical space for their activities, using the Internet instead for training and co-ordination.

To illustrate the importance of the Internet to extremists, Gharbi cited Dr. Dhiya Rashwan, an expert on Islamic groups at al-Ahram Center for Strategic Studies, who said that the militant group Al-Jamaa Islamiya (Islamic Group) was the only organisation with a website in the early 1990s, "while al-Qaeda, for instance, was not able to send its messages and to claim responsibility for Nairobi and Dar es-Salam except by fax."

Although she is unable to determine accurately who is behind the websites, Gharbi said they may just use radical rhetoric "as bait to catch female web browsers and to link female Islamists together".

Some sites have moderate everyday content, such as "for you online", while the "Khansaa" website depicts a machine gun, and "Mujahidat" offers an 8-week military training program.

Many websites target a female audience through aesthetics, focusing on the beauty of the site's presentation. "They tend to use attractive colours, and prefer pink, blue and green. They also prefer romantic backgrounds to the scenes, such as sunrises," Gharbi noted.

In March 2006, France's General Department for External Security unveiled a discussion group in which Jihadists were recruiting people possessing the ability to hack websites, to attack what they considered to be 'atheist websites,' adopting the following admonition, "If you can't slay them, then at least destroy their websites."

In Tunisia, where there are more than one million internet subscribers, the government blocks extremist and pornographic websites in an attempt to prevent destructive acts on the web. Critics of the government's policy, including the Tunisian Journalists' Union, complain of excessive censorship on the web; according to a May 3rd report issued by the Union, even the International Journalists Federation website is blocked.

The government's attorneys say the law in Tunisia does not restrict access to any political or intellectual websites, but only websites that incite violence and hatred.

The Anti-Terrorism Act of December 2003 incriminates any individual who incites hate crimes or acts of religious or racial fanaticism. Crimes of this nature are harshly punished in Tunisia, with prison sentences varying from 11 to 30 years.

At the 2007 Arab Interior Ministers' summit in Tunis, officials stressed the need to intensify co-operation "in order to siege and dry up the sources of terrorist financing and to prevent the use of modern means of communication".

Speaking at the summit, Tunisian Interior Minister Rafiq Belhaj Kacem stressed the need to work together to fight "technological crime and the associated dangerous crimes committed through the Internet".

Nikolai Sintov, spokesman for Russia's National Anti-Terrorism Committee was recently quoted as saying there are as many as 5,000 active websites promoting terrorist propaganda on the internet, up from just 12 in 1998.