Internet jihad: tackling terror on the Web

Sara Ahmad's voice quavers slightly as she recalls the summer evening nearly 18 months ago when her older brother, Babar, an IT professional, came over for dinner.

The following day Ms. Ahmad answered a knock at the door to find two policemen standing outside on her leafy suburban street. "They said he'd been arrested on a extradition request to the US," recalls Ahmad, a doctor. "I was completely shocked."

Their dinner together was the last time she's seen her brother.

Charged with running websites hosted in the US that promoted and supported Islamic militancy, Mr. Ahmad is still in British custody. He has appealed the extradition order and Britain's High Court will hear the case on Feb. 20. The proceedings will test the ability of Western governments to put on trial Islamic radicals who use the Internet as a key recruiting and organizational tool.

"In the last couple of years the use of the media by militants has grown in sophistication," says Gary Bunt, author of "Islam in the Digital Age" and a lecturer in Islamic Studies at the University of Wales. "It's very difficult to know what can be done," he says.

But while the US government pursues those who operate websites that allegedly encourage terrorism, some argue that the authorities should instead concentrate on shutting down the sites themselves as soon as possible to limit their impact.

"Leaving sites up ... for the convenience of content analysts and translators doesn't save lives," argues A. Aaron Weisburd, who runs a website monitoring jihadists' use of cyberspace. "Such monitoring did nothing to prevent the Internet from being used as the principal means to build support for the jihadists in Iraq, who in turn kill American service men and women."

Observers caution, however, against overstating the significance of such sites.

"Measuring the impact of this material is problematic," says Bunt. "People sympathetic to this material might express it in different ways. It certainly doesn't mean that everyone who reads these sites goes off and does jihad."

Ahmad's case illustrates how seriously the US is taking such websites. His extradition warrant accuses him - among other things - of helping to run azzam.com, one of the earliest and most high-profile English-language pro-jihad websites, which for a time was run by an Internet Service Provider (ISP) headquartered in Connecticut. A federal grand jury in the US indicted Ahmad in October 2004 on four charges, including that of providing material support to terrorists and conspiring to kill persons in a foreign country. If found guilty, he faces life imprisonment.

US Homeland Security official Michael J. Garcia called the indictment "a significant development in our efforts to target those who are alleged to equip and bankroll terrorists via the Internet."

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