The mighty Hesbah has finally fallen. The premier Jihadi forum has been down for about a week now and no one has yet posted links that work. Of course, Hesbah has a good track record of recovery, but that was before the current wave of forum closures that began in early September. The Shumukh forum is also down with the message, “This Account Has Been Suspended.” That leaves only Faloja. If it goes, all of the top- and second-tier forums will have been removed.
Update: Firdaws is back up. (h/t NG)
4 Responses
I still don’t know whether closing these forums is a good move or something that can backfire later. I would say that there are, at most, several hundred hardcore active members on these forums, the rest are just a silent audience. The closures are a major disruption. When the initial closures happened in September some forum members said that they would begin to rely on email groups and “encrypted” chatting.
Why not close these forums down? I thought I read that the membership in these forums was 100k plus after 9-11. Why not make it harder for the “causal” terrorist to connect with the core terrorists?
Al Boraq = alboraq.info ? The latter is accesible but I wonder whether this is the same as the infamous Al Boraq forum.
greetings
Hi BT, good catch. But that’s not _the_ Boraq. It’s a site affiliated with the Islamic Army of Iraq, which AQ-inspired Jihadis despise.