ji·had·ica

Taking Stock of the Homegrown

A new RAND report by Brian Jenkins provides a much-needed overview of jihadi radicalization cases and terrorism plots in the United States since 2001. The study pairs up very nicely with Petter Nesser’s equally indispensable overview of plots in Europe. Apart from offering a comprehensive list of cases, Jenkins makes a number of very pertinent observations, not least regarding the scale of the problem. How many of you knew that 1970s America saw 15 to 20 times as many terrorist incidents as the post 9/11 period?

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Thomas Hegghammer May 27, 2010

Jihad in Saudi Arabia

What’s the point of editing a blog if you can’t use it for shameless self promotion? My book Jihad in Saudi Arabia is finally out in the US. I am marking the occasion with a book launch at George Washington University today at 4pm, so if you are in the DC area, please come along.

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Thomas Hegghammer May 19, 2010

Guest Post: The Story of Eric Breininger

[Editor’s note: This post was written by Christopher Radler and Behnam Said, who are intelligence analysts based in Hamburg, Germany. For links to the original document, see the comments to the preview post.] On 3 May a message announcing the death of Eric Breininger (b. 3 August 1987) and three of his fellow combatants was posted on several German jihadist websites. Breininger, who travelled to the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan in the winter 2007, was one of the most infamous German jihadists. From Waziristan Breininger, a.k.a. “Abdul Ghaffar al-Almani”, sent several videotaped messages to the jihadist community in Germany, asking them to join the jihad or at least to support it financially. Since September 2008 the German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) searched for Breininger, based on his assumed affiliation with a foreign terrorist organization. A day after the announcement of his death, Breininger’s alleged autobiography, entitled Mein

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Thomas Hegghammer May 11, 2010

Homegrown Literature

Since the topic of homegrown militancy is very much in focus these days, I wanted to flag a very interesting series of reports on radicalization in various European countries produced by the Centre for Studies of Islamism and Radicalisation at Aarhus University in Denmark. The Centre’s mission is to bridge the gap between the fields of terrorism studies and Islamism studies, and their reports do that quite nicely.

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Thomas Hegghammer May 10, 2010

Good Insights

The latest issue of the journal Arab Insight has two particularly interesting articles: one on al-Qaida in Yemen by Abdul Elah Shayea (the guy who interviews AQAP people) and another on the decline of the global jihad by Murad al-Shishani. Those of you who don’t know the journal should check out past issues; there are lots of very interesting pieces.

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Thomas Hegghammer May 7, 2010

Preview: Autobiography of a German Jihadist

The memoirs of Erik Breininger, the German jihadist who was allegedly recently killed in Waziristan, have reportedly appeared online. I haven’t seen them myself yet, but if their authenticity can be established, we are dealing with an extremely valuable document. Jihadica will bring you more details soon.

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Thomas Hegghammer May 5, 2010

New Report Profiling the Taliban

Anne Stenersen has written a new FFI report on the organizational structure and ideology of the Taliban. The report is based on field research, analysis of online Taliban propaganda and a thorough review of the secondary literature. This is essential reading for anyone working Afghanistan. One of her conclusions caught my eye: “For the time being, it looks like any attempt to negotiate with the Taliban leadership directly would serve to strengthen the insurgent movement, rather than weakening it. A more realistic approach is probably to try to weaken the Taliban’s coherence through negotiating with, and offering incentives to, low-level commanders and tribal leaders inside Afghanistan.”

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Thomas Hegghammer April 23, 2010

Spy Forums

In a remarkable story, the Washington Post reported today that Saudi intelligence and the CIA operated a honeypot jihadi forum for years until it was shut down by the US military in 2008. The news here is obviously not that intelligence services run jihadi forums, but that US agencies wage cyberwarfare on each other. Since I don’t know what is technologically possible and what is not, I don’t have an opinion on the issue of forum takedowns, but I find the lack of interagency coordination appalling. Bureaucratic politics aside, which forum was it? The Post article does not say. There are several candidates, since many forums went down in 2008, foremost of which Ekhlaas (September) and Hesbah (November). I initially suspected the latter, but I was a little confused by the article mentioning events in “early 2008”. So I asked my forum-watching colleagues Evan Kohlmann and Reuven Paz, and they

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Thomas Hegghammer March 19, 2010

New Reports

My brilliant friend and countryman Jacob Høigilt has just written an absolutely fascinating report on Islamism and Education in the Palestinian Territories. It’s fieldwork-based, rich  and nuanced, and it undermines widespread assumptions about the link between Islamic education and militancy. While I am at it, I might as well mention my own completely unrelated CTC paper on the Failure of Jihad in Saudi Arabia.

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Thomas Hegghammer March 4, 2010

Did Jordanian Intelligence Kill Abdallah Azzam?

Of the many fascinating details in the Sahab interview with Abu Dujana al-Khurasani, one made my jaw drop and break my self-imposed blogging ban. Abu Dujana says his Jordanian handler named another Jordanian intelligence official as the person responsible for the assassination of Abdallah Azzam in Peshawar in November 1989: “This idiot confessed to me and told me, ‘if you go and kill any leader of the mujahidin, you’ll become a top man in Jordan, like my chief, Ali Burjaq’. According to Abu Zayd [Abu Dujana’s handler], Ali Burjaq, Director of Jordanian counterterrorism, is the man responsible for the murder of the shahid, as we reckon him, shaykh Abdullah Azzam in Peshawar 20 years ago.”   (translation by Adam Gadahn) As you know, Azzam’s assassins have never been identified, and numerous theories have been suggested (CIA, Mossad, Usama bin Ladin, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Khad, KGB to mention a few).

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Thomas Hegghammer February 28, 2010
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