Non-Subscriber Extract
Technology moves modern battlespace into cyberspace
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| 13 October 2005 |
By Bruce Jones
Mature, communally based, resilient support networks are the key factor in determining whether groups such as ETA, the Provisional IRA, and Chechen fighters prevail, or fail like the Baader-Meinhof Gang, Red Brigades and Red Army Faction. However, their successors, through their use of mass travel, IT and the new media, have emerged as militant 'virtual global constituencies'.
'Virtual global constituencies' are random and informal; have a broad, self-selective, ethnic and religious base; are not limited by a single language, nationality or cultural home; and have common adaptable agendas and terms of reference, whether in Peshawar, Brooklyn or Marseilles. Up to 5,000 Islamist and similar militant websites support them at any one time. The greater part of their content is not only propaganda, but information to target specific operations, labelled aerial photos, bomb-making instructions, ambush procedures and infiltration routes. Their material is highly refined and is aimed at specific audience groups, such as the poor, the middle class and international groups.
Leaders and front organisations groom potential recruits through websites, chat rooms and forums, before moving them to increasingly radical websites and levels of complicity.
Of equal concern, websites have shown that Islamist militants have begun to meet with and join forces with militant groups such as those supporting anti-globalisation, anarchist and far-left movements.
The process of disseminating messages advocating extremism and the support of violence runs in a continuous 'terrorist information cycle' from recruitment, through facilitation, funding, planning, operations, publicity, media, public diplomacy and back to recruitment.
Through 'failed' states, underlying historical antagonism, IT, the urban mix and 'virtual global constituencies' we now face the somewhat clichéd global 'clash of civilisations' between a dysfunctional West and a static Middle East.
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