Al-Qaeda - a Growing Threat

Kristian Manibusan

ENG-106

March 9, 2018

Kimbel Westerson

Al-Qaeda: The Growing Threat

“The pictures of airplanes flying into buildings, fires burning, huge structures collapsing, have filled us with disbelief, terrible sadness and a quiet, unyielding anger,” Former President George W. Bush (U.S. National Archives, 2001, 0:43-0:58). His above statement was witnessed across the world and brought to the surface; the danger of global security posed by Al Qaeda. The threat of Al Qaeda’s presence not only visible in physicals aspects, but technological: social media. Al-Qaeda’s battleground has expanded over the past 30 years from munitions and large antiaircraft weapons to recruitment over social media interfaces. The organization continues to grow in power and threaten the security at the community level by spreading ideologies via media, finding financial support to sustain terrorist operations, and using the weapons to commit jihad, which caused the United Nations to initiate counterterrorism tactics.

The battlefield for terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda are expanding and media interfaces are fueling supporters and members’ propaganda, and much like any business in the workforce, terrorist groups heavily rely on media (radio, news stations, Facebook, etc.) to broadcast their statements. Historically, Al-Qaeda was created to combat the Soviets in the late 80’s. They would use VCR/VHS tapes recorded by affiliates and personnel of Al-Qaeda to spread propaganda (Brooking and Singer, 2016) to motivate locals in the region to help drive out the Soviets, which was a success. However, Usama Bin Laden’s agenda soon became to expand his beliefs to the entire Middle East, where any governments whose views that did not align with Usama bin Laden’s practice of Islamic Jihad, were to be removed from the region by violent force, according to the FBI’s former Acting Director of Counterterrorism, Mr. Caruso (FBI, 2001). In turn, terrorist organization supporters and members started recording videos of their slaughtering and publishing it to the internet or submit the video files to media outlets in retaliation of the western presence. This drive to push the U.S. and other coalition forces out of the region were due to prior clashes with Al-Qaeda affiliates and members during Operation Restore Hope in Somalia, and during the Gulf War. For example, a recent submission from an ISIS supporter to Al-Jazeera came from a man (Mohamed Merah), where he began shooting a few off-duty U.S. soldiers, including putting a bullet into an eight-year-old girl’s head. The submission of these senseless acts of violence also display how simple social media has made it to disseminate propaganda videos, aiding the social engineering goal of al-Sahab’s (Al-Qaeda’s media group) around the globe (Ciovacco, 2009). This may allow supporters with money to further aid the organization’s ability to access high-powered weapons.

Finances acquired by Al-Qaeda is due to supporters and malicious tactics to obtain funds. According to Williams-Grut, “One way terrorists can get funds is by scamming banks. The key dangers are fraud and complicit employees helping terrorists gain access to bank accounts and loans,” (2015, para. 4). One common scam that is prevalent amongst most cyber attackers is phishing. More specifically, email spoofing is used with most black hats. In this case, the cyber criminals supporting Al Qaida appear as another employee or the CEO of a company. The sender will leave a link the email hoping the employee will open the link. After the employee opens the link, a form of malware is installed in the system, which allows the attacker to steal whatever information they are searching for. Al-Qaeda hackers will commonly use key-logger malware. This malicious software tracks every keyboard stroke on the target’s system (Landesman, 2017). They will then use this information to steal customer information to take money from customer accounts and create fraudulent applications for loans. For example, a jihadist supporter received €15,000 or $16,200 from a bank called “ING Belgium”. Another primary source of financial support Al-Qaeda receives is donations from supporters, according to Williams-Grut (2017). The supporters are usually from local communities who share similar beliefs with Al-Qaeda. This is effective in helping fund weapons supporters since Al-Qaeda’s presence not only resides in the Middle East, but in northern African countries, like Somalia and Egypt. The region is large, which could lead to millions of supporters donating a few dollars to their efforts. According to Williams-Grut, sometimes Al-Qaeda operatives will also disguise as fundraisers for a charity (2015). For example, there was a case where two men were captured for fraudulent representation of charity back in 2008, where they were caught aiding terrorist organizations. The frightening ordeal with this is that once the money is dispersed, it ends up in communities across the world, as weapons are trafficked for money, drugs, etc.

Because of financial support and acquisition by Al-Qaeda to obtain weapons, these weapons are used in terrorist acts across the globe. According to Holbrook, “Ayman al-Zawahiri’s leadership of al-Qaeda has been beset by a series of calamities that threaten the viability of the movement’s core group and its legacy,” (Holbrook, 2015, p. 93, para. 1). While the leader tries to legitimatize its efforts, it includes a variety of propaganda encouraging jihad on western entities and opposing government. For example, an attack by this group was conducted back in 2005 and included a tri-bomb detonation in the city of Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt (Windrem, n.d.). The purpose behind this attack was because el-Sheikh is a resort city that is commonly traveled to by westerners, and since Al-Qaeda members disagree with western cultural and political views, this city was a target, where the attackers killed 63 people. Since Usama bin Laden’s death, the leadership have also been challenged with trying to delegitimatize terror groups like ISIS, and establish their presence as a global jihadist group, as they feel that they have relevance in the world as an anti-western organization (Holbrook, 2015). This position and spreading of this propaganda lead to a more recent attack in 2017. This attack took place in Yemen, where a Yemenis Army base was attacked and 12 were killed. These widespread global attacks have placed significant pressure on policy/lawmakers across the world to fund anti-terrorism activities for the sake of global safety.

Global security becomes a topic of debate when handling terrorist organizations, which lead to governments to develop solutions