xi

“The story of the presence of terrorist groups in cyberspace has barely begun

to be told,” Gabriel Weimann reflected almost a decade ago in his semi-

nal work, Terror on the Internet. Even so accomplished a scholar of com-

munications as Professor Weimann, however, could not have anticipated

the changes and advances in technology that would revolutionize terrorism

during the second decade of the twenty-first century.

Much like Afghanistan in the 1990s, places like Syria and Iraq today

have often been described as the “perfect jihadi storm”: magnets for for-

eign fighters, where violence is theologically justified by clerics issuing

fatwas (religious edicts) and where rebels—including core al-Qaeda loyal-

ists like Jabhat al-Nusra (the Al-Nusra Front) and renegade groups such as

the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS)—benefit from the largesse of

wealthy Arabian Gulf patrons. But a critical distinction between the strug-

gle in Afghanistan during the closing decades of the twentieth century and

in Syria and Iraq in the early twenty-first-century is the evolution of infor-

mation technology and communications that has unfolded since Terror on

ForewordBruce Hoffman

xii Foreword

the Internet was published in 2006. The growth and communicative power

of social networking platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Insta-

gram, Flickr, and WhatsApp have transformed terrorism: facilitating both

ubiquitous and real-time communication between like-minded radicals with

would-be recruits and potential benefactors, thus fueling and expanding the

fighting and bloodshed to a hitherto almost unprecedented extent.

As Terrorism in Cyberspace: The Next Generation so ably explains, it is

not uncommon nowadays for foreign fighters prosecuting these conflicts to

amass thousands of followers on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.

They communicate with their audiences often on a daily basis—and some-

times multiple times each day—providing first-hand, immediate accounts

of heroic battles and more mundane daily activities, making jihad accessi-

ble and comprehensible on a uniquely intimate and personal basis. Fighters

invite, motivate, animate, and summon their Twitter followers and Face-

book friends to travel to Syria and Iraq and partake of the holy war against

the Assad and Maliki regimes. Blatant sectarian messaging and divinely

ordained clarion calls to resist Persian domination and help determine the

outcome of the eternal struggle between Sunni and Shi’a—and the latter’s

Alawite satraps—provide additional, compelling incentives. Indeed, a recent

ISIS recruitment video posted on the Internet featured heavily armed mili-

tants with distinctive British and Australian accents trumpeting the virtues

of jihad and the ineluctable religious imperative of joining the caravan of

martyrs. It is therefore not surprising to find that all of al-Qaeda’s most

important affiliates—al Shabaab, Ansar al-Sharia, Boko Haram, the Abdul-

lah Azzam Brigades, Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Al-Qaeda in the

Arabian Peninsula, the Al-Nusra Front, and the Afghan Taliban—as well as

the outlawed ISIS, all have Twitter accounts on which they regularly tweet.

According to Weimann, social media provides manifold advantages to

terrorists. “New communication technologies,” he explains, “such as com-

paratively inexpensive and accessible mobile and web-based networks,

create highly interactive platforms through which individuals and commu-

nities share, co-create, discuss, and modify content.” Interactivity, reach,

frequency, usability, immediacy, and permanence are the benefits reaped by

terrorist groups exploiting and harnessing these new technologies.

Much as Terror on the Internet filled a conspicuous gap in the litera-

ture on terrorists and terrorism when it was first published, Terrorism in Cyberspace does the same now. It represents the next step in its author’s

decades-long quest to map, analyze, and understand the evolution of terrorist

communications that has occurred since the advent of the Internet and this

Foreword xiii

new form of mass communication. When Weimann first began to examine

this phenomenon in 1998, he recounts, there were perhaps no more than

a dozen terrorist groups online—including al-Qaeda. Today, Weimann’s

attention is consumed by a staggering 10,000 terrorist websites, in addition

to the innumerable social media platforms proliferating throughout cyber-

space. “This trend,” Weimann warns, “is combined with the emergence of

lone wolf terrorism: attacks by individual terrorists who are not members

of any terrorist organization.” He describes how lone wolf terrorism is the

“ fastest-growing kind of terrorism, especially in the West, where all recent

lone wolf attacks involved individuals who were radicalized, recruited,

trained, and even launched on social media platforms.” The implications

for law enforcement and intelligence and security agencies, already stretched

thin by splintering groups, multiplying threats, and their own diminished

budgets and resources, are fundamentally disquieting.

Weimann believes that government counterterrorism efforts must adjust

and recalibrate existing strategies and tactics to meet the immense chal-

lenges presented by these new communications and propaganda platforms.

The considerable knowledge and experience that communications experts

in the United States have acquired in running political and advertising cam-

paigns, he argues, need to be appropriated and redirected to countering ter-

rorism and terrorist use of the Internet and social media. To do so, Weimann

contends, we need to better anticipate future trends in terrorist communica-

tions and better prepare to counter them before they actually materialize.

Terrorism in Cyberspace embodies the hallmarks of Weimann’s decades

of scholarship: presenting a comprehensive, thoughtful, and sober analy-

sis—supported by voluminous empirical evidence and trenchant, revealing

examples. Years from now, when historians seek to explain how the threat

from al-Qaeda and associated groups as well as still more radical offshoots

surfaced and multiplied throughout 2013 and 2014, Terrorism in Cyber-space will be indispensable in revealing how all this came to pass. For that

reason, among others, this book is essential reading for anyone seeking to

understand the dynamics of contemporary terrorism and its exploitation of

modern media technology.

Bruce Hoffman

Washington, D.C.

June 2014