ISLAM: JIHAD SPREADS VIA THE INTERNET

Internet radicals may eclipse bin Laden among jihadists

As radical Islam spreads globally through online forums and chat rooms, a group of obscure Arab religious thinkers may come to exert more influence over the jihadist movement than Osama bin Laden and other well-known leaders of Al Qaeda, a research group at the U.S. Military Academy has concluded.

In a study billed as the "first systematic mapping" of an ideology sometimes called jihadism, the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point has found that bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, have had a relatively minor influence on the movement's intellectual foundation. Among the network's ideologists, they have come to be seen more as propagandists than strategic thinkers.

And while the two Qaeda leaders have released a flurry of video and audio messages to their followers over the past year, the study found that the scholarly work of a group of Saudi and Jordanian clerics - most notably Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, a Jordanian - seems more likely to influence the next generation of Islamic militants.

As a result, the authors found, the death or capture of bin Laden and Zawahiri would do little to slow the spread of jihadist ideology.

"It would be a blow in terms of the emotional impact, but in terms of the larger movement that the foot soldiers are being recruited into, it wouldn't put much of a dent into it at all," said William McCants, the chief author of the new report, "The Militant Ideology Atlas."

The 382-page report, a kind of Who's Who of the global jihadist movement, examines the most influential and widely read texts among the thousands of tracts in Qaeda's online library, known as the Tawhed.

With the dismantling of the Qaeda hierarchy that existed on Sept. 11, 2001, and the diffusion of the jihadist movement into smaller, more localized cells, the Tawhed has gained new significance in helping to shape militant thought.

U.S. officials say they fear the next generation of terrorist attacks could be carried out not by militants trained in Qaeda camps but by fighters influenced by radical texts posted online.

"The radicalization process is occurring more quickly, more widely and more anonymously in the Internet age, raising the likelihood of surprise attacks by unknown groups whose members and supporters may be difficult to pinpoint," concluded a National Intelligence Estimate on global terrorism completed this year.

Although situated at West Point, the Combating Terrorism Center is an independent research group financed by private sources and the government.

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