Jihad’s newest recruitment centre: Internet

Before Hadi bin Mubarak Qahtani exploded himself into an anonymous fireball, he was young and interested only in ‘‘fooling around....

Before Hadi bin Mubarak Qahtani exploded himself into an anonymous fireball, he was young and interested only in ‘‘fooling around.’’

Like many Saudis, he was said to have experienced a religious awakening after the 9/11 attacks and dedicated himself to Allah, inspired by ‘‘the holy attack that demolished the foolish infidel Americans and caused many young men to awaken from their deep sleep,’’ according to a posting on a jihadist website.

On April 11, he died a suicide bomber, part of a coordinated insurgent attack on a US Marine base in Qaim, Iraq. Two days later, ‘‘the Martyrdom of Hadi bin Mubarak al-Qahtani’’ was announced on the Internet, the requiem for a young Saudi who had clamoured to follow ‘‘those 19 heroes’’ of 9/11 and had found in Iraq an accessible way to die.

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Hundreds of similar accounts of suicide bombers are featured on the rapidly proliferating array of websites run by radical Islamists, online celebrations of death that offer US military officials a wealth of information about an otherwise shadowy foe.

The account of Qahtani’s death, like many individual entries on the websites, cannot be verified. But independent experts and former government terrorism analysts who monitor the sites believe they are genuine mouthpieces for the Al Qaeda-affiliated militants who have made Iraq ‘‘a melting pot for jihadists from around the world, a training group and an indoctrination centre,’’ as a recent State Department report put it.

The roster of the dead on just one extremist website reviewed by the Washington Post runs to nearly 250 names, ranging from a 13-year-old Syrian boy said to have died fighting the Americans in Falluja to the reigning kung fu champion of Jordan who snuck off to wage war by telling his family he was going to a tournament.

Among the dead are students of engineering and English, the son of a Moroccan restaurateur and a smattering of Europeanised Arabs. There are also long lists of names about whom nothing more was recorded than a country of origin and the word ‘‘martyr.’’

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Some counterterrorism officials are sceptical about relying on information from publicly available websites, but others view the lists of the dead ‘‘for internal purposes’’ more than for propaganda, as British researcher Paul Eedle put it. ‘‘These are efforts on the part of jihadis to collate deaths. It’s like footballers on the Net getting a buzz out of knowing somebody’s transferred from Chelsea to Liverpool.’’

‘‘The Internet sites try to recruit people—it’s the best recruitment tool,’’ said Saudi security analyst Nawaf Obaid Obaid, who has worked closely with the government. He said he found 47 cases of Saudis who were dead and injured reported in the kingdom’s newspapers, far lower than Internet totals, and concluded the overall number of Saudi jihadis in Iraq was in the hundreds.

Evan Kohlmann, a researcher who monitors Islamic extremist web sites, has compiled a list of more than 235 names of Iraqi dead from the Internet since last summer. Some postings also include phone numbers so Islamists can call a dead fighter’s family and congratulate them. Kohlmann called several of the numbers. ‘‘I have lists and lists of foreign fighters and it’s no joke. Their sons went and blew themselves up in Iraq,’’ he said. —LAT-WP