US intelligence frets over Islamist cyber-threat

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The spread of radical Islamist websites offers disaffected Muslims in the West indoctrination and training for extremist attacks, the US intelligence community warned yesterday.

A new National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded that Al-Qaeda has regrouped in its Pakistani "safe haven" and is determined again to strike the United States, highlighted the elusive cyber-front of the "war on terror."

"The spread of radical -- especially Salafi -- Internet sites, increasingly aggressive anti-US rhetoric and actions, and the growing number of radical, self-generating cells in Western countries indicate that the radical and violent segment of the West's Muslim population is expanding, including in the United States," the report said.

Globalization and technological advances "will continue to enable even small numbers of alienated people to find and connect with one another," feed off each other's anger and plan attacks, the report said.

They can do this "all without requiring a centralized terrorist organization, training camp, or leader."

Western law enforcers have long been worried about the proliferation of Islamist websites that, via propaganda and training manuals, give would-be militants the inspiration and know-how to execute terror attacks.

"Terror on the Internet," a 2006 book by Israeli terrorism expert Gabriel Weimann, said the number of websites operated by terror groups of all ideologies had mushroomed from just 12 in 1998 to more than 4,800 last year.

The US intelligence report highlighted the growth of websites from Salafi groups that advocate a return to a purist Islam shorn of modern influences -- including, ironically, such innovations as computers and the Internet.

Arrests in the United States show that violent Islamic extremists "are becoming more connected ideologically, virtually, and/or in a physical sense to the global extremist movement," the report said.

This "points to the possibility that others may become sufficiently radicalized that they will view the use of violence here as legitimate."

"We assess that this internal Muslim terrorist threat is not likely to be as severe as it is in Europe, however," the report stressed.