Terrorists Turn to the Web as Base of Operations

By Steve Coll and Susan B. Glasser, Washington Post Staff Writers, Sunday, August 7, 2005; Page A01

In the snow-draped mountains near Jalalabad in November 2001, as the Taliban collapsed and al Qaeda lost its Afghan sanctuary, Osama bin Laden biographer Hamid Mir watched "every second al Qaeda member carrying a laptop computer along with a Kalashnikov" as they prepared to scatter into hiding and exile. On the screens were photographs of Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta.
Nearly four years later, al Qaeda has become the first guerrilla movement in history to migrate from physical space to cyberspace. With laptops and DVDs, in secret hideouts and at neighborhood Internet cafes, young code-writing jihadists have sought to replicate the training, communication, planning and preaching facilities they lost in Afghanistan with countless new locations on the Internet.

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NOTE: Al Qaeda and the Internet, Terrorism researcher Evan Kohlmann was online to discuss al Qaeda and its use of the Internet.