Terror network flourishes on Web
Internet’s speed, anonymity has made it an ideal place for al-Qaida to set up training and support. In the snowy mountains near Jalalabad in November 2001, as the Taliban collapsed and al-Qaida lost its Afghan sanctuary, Osama bin Laden biographer Hamid Mir watched “every second al-Qaida member carrying a laptop computer along with a Kalashnikov” as they prepared to scatter into hiding. Nearly four years later, al-Qaida has become the first guerrilla movement in history to migrate from physical space to cyberspace. With laptops and DVDs, in secret hide-outs and at Internet cafes, young code-writing jihadists have sought to replicate training, communication, planning and preaching facilities they lost in Afghanistan with new locations on the Internet. Full Story