As jihadist militants continue attacks on military and government targets, the recent release of a video by Ansar al-Quds, a militant jihadist organization, points to an increased use by these groups of media to complement their military operations.
The video shows former Major Waleed Badr confessing to the attempted assassination of Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim near his home in Nasr City, east of Cairo. The video closes with the large, fiery explosion of the car bomb, which pierces the air and draws strong reactions from cars and passersby.
The increase use of media by jihadists was also evident during the filming of the satellite station bombing south of Cairo a few weeks ago.
What is perhaps surprising about the use of media by these organizations is that its conflicts with our stereotypes of a jihadist, who we often think of as an uneducated country bumpkin, rather than a tech-savy man behind a camera, uploading a video of a terrorist attack to the internet.
Major General Adel Suleiman, president of the Strategic Dialogue Forum, says jihadist groups have powerful media and military arms, for most of their members are engineers and specialists, unlike people think. “They have technical knowledge,” he says. “And they use it before and after military operations.”
IT expert Hani Abdel Aziz says terrorist groups in Egypt use sophisticated techniques to upload videos to mask their true identities and location. “They use unknown programs that security services find difficult to track down,” he says.
“CPROXY is one such program that opens another account every half hour,” he says. “This makes it difficult for the security services to follow.”
Abdel Aziz explained this program is not as common in Egypt as other places, like Saudia Arabia, which is where the idea likely originated for a jihadist application to this program. “Saudis use CPROXY to access prohibited pornographic sites,” he says. “And the Saudi authorities often fail to prevent it because the user goes from Saudi Arabia to China to open these sites.”
Suleiman argues that such technological expertise has been transferred from outside Egypt. “They are learned, having worked abroad,” he adds. “They use the Internet to recruit new members or post their military operations.”
Abdel Ghafour Shemeis, a leading figure of the Jamaa Islamiya group, agrees, adding that most expertise was accumulated in Iraq or Syria and transferred to Cairo when the jihadists came to settle there.
“Maybe they were helped by foreign intelligence services,” he guessed, pointing to former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi who helped Egypt’s Revolution Organization to attack the Israeli embassy in the early eighties. “They used high technology to film the attack before and after, thanks to Libyan regime support.”
Shemeis also argues that the rate at which new groups are able to get started and running, shows they must be receiving outside help. “Some jihadist groups have been formed as recently as a few months ago,” he says. “Still they have advanced media technologies, which proves they are supported by foreign elements.”
“Jihadist groups learned this technique while serving in Afghanistan or Iraq,” he says. “They use public places to upload their materials.”
Jacqueline Zahir, an expert of Islamic movements affairs, says the sophisticated media capabilities of the Islamist currents became evident after the 25 January revolution, when their websites and social networking pages began to appear. This expansion of media, however, was seen across all sectors of society. “Jihadist groups are no exception,” she says.
Zahir argues that jihadists honed in on their skill when they coordinated wide media campaigns to smear opponents of the former president and his colleagues in the Muslim Brotherhood.
“This was demonstrated in the technological activities of the different brigades targeting opposition figures during the term of deposed President Mohamed Morsy,” she says. “This shows that they are no naive amateurs, but rather well-trained experts that know how to use and abuse the media.”
Jihadist groups all over understand the importance of media, especially Al-Qaeda, argues media expert Yasser Abdel Aziz. He points to a message Ayman al-Zawahiri sent in 2005 to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, telling him “remember my brother that half of our battle is in the media.”
“This shows how important the media machine is to those terrorist groups next to their military arm,” he says.
Abdel Aziz was quick to make the connection with the Brotherhood. “Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, talked about the importance of the media in one of his speeches,” he says. “I believe the media strategy accounts for half of their overall strategy.”
