ahlu-sunnah.com: forum of Germany's radical Salafis

[Aaron]

Not all Salafis are political, let alone extremist, but in Germany...

ahlu-sunnah.com: virtual home for Germany's HVEs

The founding father of the forum[1] is Tarek S., who claims at various times to be either in Dresden or Hamburg. The domain was first registered on 24 April 2008, and remained in the name of Tarek S. until 26 November 2010. Between the 24th and 26 of November the domain was transferred to Hostgator.com of Houston, TX, who hold it in proxy. Whether or to what extent Tarek S. may have distanced himself from activities in support of terrorism at that point is not known to me.

Why the change in November of 2010? Germany was on high alert at the time, fearing an attack possibly linked to Yemen. And it would be reasonable to view ahlu-sunnah.com as a source of inspiration to and/or a place frequented by homegrown violent extremists, particularly followers of Anwar al-Awlaki. There was clear evidence, not only of support for Awlaki and his views at ahlu-sunnah.com[2], but also of the presence of ahlu-sunnah.com forum members among the activists at anwar-alawalki.com, the dear deceased sheikh's blog. The most notable example is the following entry from Awlaki's blog:

Awlaki had just given permission for his followers to translate his work into whatever language they could. By the time blog was taken down following the Ft. Hood attack, work was underway to translate Awlaki into 18 languages. Bruder AmatulHaq was proud to announce that a group of brothers and sisters had translated various items into German. Two were posted at ahlu-sunnah.com, and remain there to this day:

http://www.ahlu-sunnah.com/threads/2...l=1#post329018

and

http://www.ahlu-sunnah.com/threads/2...l=1#post328971

It's not like ahlu-sunnah.com is trying to hide their infatuation with the former head of external operations for al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula:

http://www.ahlu-sunnah.com/threads/20511-Anwar-Awlaki

And the effort to translate Awlaki's screed re: Somalia is... interesting, particularly in light of more recent data showing that Somalia is supplanting AFPAK as a preferred destination for German jihadis seeking action abroad.

Regardless of what pressure may have been applied to the operators of ahlu-sunnah.com in November of 2010, or what surveillance the German government may be conducting on the site, neither was sufficient to prevent the murder of these two American servicemen:

http://www.lakenheath.af.mil/news/st...p?id=123245206

3/4/2011 - WASHINGTON (AFNS) -- Air Force officials announced March 3 the deaths of two Airmen as a result of the March 2 shooting at Frankfurt International Airport, Germany.

Killed were:

Senior Airman Nicholas J. Alden , 25, of Williamston, S.C., assigned to the 48th Security Forces Squadron at Royal Air Force Lakenheath, England.

Airman 1st Class Zachary R. Cuddeback, 21, of Stanardsville, Va., assigned to the 86th Vehicle Readiness Squadron at Ramstein Air Base, Germany.

Alden is survived by his wife Trish, daughter Lilly, and son William. Cuddeback is survived by his mother De Loyet, father Bob, and brother Tim.

My sources in Germany report that at a minimum, Arid Uka was an avid consumer of the hateful ideology espoused within ahlu-sunnah.com. How did he escape detection? Probably by not saying anything. Not saying anything is the norm on Islamic extremist forums, and this is the problem with relying on what people say as an indicator of what they will do. If you want to prevent terrorism, rather than merely investigate after the fact, you need to identify the communities that spawn operational terrorists. ahlu-sunnah.com is one such community.

Among the connections between ahlu-sunnah.com and Arid Uka is one Ibn Bashir, of Marburg, who was a Facebook friend of Uka's and clearly identifies with ahlu-sunnah.com. Not surprisingly, when we look at Ibn Bashir's friends we find many who were also friends of Arid Uka, and in addition are linked to each other. This is how you know you're looking at a network - regardless of what node serves as your point of entry, you keep seeing the same people. In this case there are so many links that I'll be putting further discussion of this network into a thread of its own.

---

[1] At least in terms of domain registration. It can be safely assumed that the site is actually the product of a network, of which Saidi is probably not the ranking member.

[2] As a quick and dirty measure, a Google search for site:ahlu-sunnah.com+awlaki produces 330 results.

[Aaron]

IP address:

Name:	ahlu-sunnah.com
Address: 46.163.116.174

Netblock:

inetnum:         46.163.112.0 - 46.163.119.255
remarks:         INFRA-AW
netname:         DE-HE-LVPS-46-163-112-NET
descr:           Host Europe GmbH
descr:           hostmaster@hosteurope.de
country:         DE

Nameservers:

	lvps46-163-116-174.dedicated.hosteurope.de
	ns2.hans.hosteurope.de

As is clear from this, the site is on a server in Germany, which may make surveillance more convenient, but is unlikely to save any lives if that surveillance does no more than focus on who says what. As I said above, most say nothing, and you can very definitely count the silent ones among those who ultimately kill. The problem is the community itself. As for how you address such a threat, the answer is simple: external pressure and internal division. This is nothing new - such tactics have been an integral part of the work of secret services for years, centuries really.

[Aaron]

millatu-ibrahim.com
http://forum.internet-haganah.com/sh...Qaida-movement

[diba]

[My sources in Germany report that at a minimum, Arid Uka was an avid consumer of the hateful ideology espoused within ahlu-sunnah.com. How did he escape detection? Probably by not saying anything. Not saying anything is the norm on Islamic extremist forums, and this is the problem with relying on what people say as an indicator of what they will do. If you want to prevent terrorism, rather than merely investigate after the fact, you need to identify the communities that spawn operational terrorists. ahlu-sunnah.com is one such community.]

Arid Uka was also a member of GIMF Forum. So he radicalized several years before.
But is this a reason to close these forums? No, because it is better to monitor the jihadi websites. And the same happens with British and American Jihadi websites; they don't close the websites because of monitoring.

And then there is still another question: Yes, there are these virtual communities who are important for radcalization young people. But you should know when German authorities can arrest somebody! Is it possible to arrest somebody, because he is a member of ahlu-sunnah.com?

[Aaron]

If monitoring means also attending to those who say nothing, it's still likely not good enough. You can't tell who will become involved in terrorism and who will not. The fact that many, probably most, will not get involved in violence is explained for the most part by a lack of ambition, initiative, and imagination on the part of the aspiring jihadis.

If Germany wanted to shut the site down, it could do so. But why? First, it would just relocate to Malaysia, making SIGINT a little more difficult. Second, you cannot apply pressure or sow seeds of division if you shut down the site.

So by all means, keep it online until community members come to so distrust one another that the community breaks up of its own accord.

Meanwhile, if German law is going to be used by jihadis to try and harass me, I reserve the right to return the favor by appealing to the court of public opinion.

Court is in session.

[Aaron]

While we are on the subject a few key points:

The people who Arid Uka killed were not German.

The people who have been or will be killed by German jihadis in AFPAK or Somalia likewise are not or will not be German.

If Germany knows how many jihadis are currently on jihad - and Germany does know this - that suggests that Germany knew they were leaving and let them do so.

Here in the US we do not, as a rule, do that.[1] No, when someone is about to board a plane to make hijra to some "land of jihad" and start killing people, we arrest the bastard.

Why?

Because it's the right thing to do.

Letting your problem leave and become the cause of someone else's death is something other than right.

--

[1] The best known exception being Samir Khan, who appears to have been allowed to leave in order to lead the US to Awlaki.

[diba]

[QUOTE=Aaron;1572]

Letting your problem leave and become the cause of someone else's death is something other than right.



Yes, it is not alright, that Germans don't care about jihadism. A lot of Germans even doesn't recognize that these radicalized young Germans are a security problem. It seem that a lot don't care that Americans were killed by German Jihadists. These Germans think that this is all right-wing propaganda!

But there is also the question if german authorities are really in the position to prevent or protect attacks. The most informations about planned attacks in Germany were from the US authorities. But most people don't recognize that most informations about Jihadists and planned attacks are from Americans. Informations about the German admin of Ansar al Jihad were from Spanish authorities, but I think the Spanish got the informations from American intelligence agencies. So are the German intelligence agencies so good to prevent anything.... I don't think so!

In Germany they start to recognize that online jihadism is a problem. But most of the people still don't believe that young people only radicalize because of watching jihadi websites....even experts say that's impossible that somebody self radicalize. So they don't know that the admin of German Ansar al-Jihad was monitored for one year by the BKA and never left home to meet other Jihadis!

After a jihadist attack in Germany the Germans will recognize that they must change....

[Aaron]

After a jihadist attack in Germany the Germans will recognize that they must change....

Yes, that is the sad part: everything becomes much more clear after the bombs go off.

[Aaron]

...they are discussing their Haganah problem:

95.118.154.207 - - [05/Mar/2012:04:29:39 -0600] "GET /showthread.php?692 HTTP/1.1" 200 14922 "http://www.ahlu-sunnah.com/private.php?do=showpm&pmid=351412" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:10.0.2) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/10.0.2"

That IP's hostname is

kiel-5f769acf.pool.mediaWays.net

making a location of Kiel likely.

[Aaron]

Forum admin threatened with prosecution in Germany...
http://forum.internet-haganah.com/showthread.php?669

Sheikh Numbnutz Hearts Terrorists
http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/211342.php

ahlu-sunnah.com: forum of Germany's radical Salafis
http://forum.internet-haganah.com/showthread.php?692

Millatu-Ibrahim.com: German site of the Global Jihad a/k/a the al-Qaida movement
http://forum.internet-haganah.com/showthread.php?671

New site in Germany... [millatu-ibrahim.com]
http://forum.internet-haganah.com/showthread.php?232

alhaakimiyya
http://forum.internet-haganah.com/showthread.php?342

[diba]

...they are discussing their Haganah problem:

95.118.154.207 - - [05/Mar/2012:04:29:39 -0600] "GET /showthread.php?692 HTTP/1.1" 200 14922 "http://www.ahlu-sunnah.com/private.php?do=showpm&pmid=351412" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:10.0.2) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/10.0.2"

That IP's hostname is

kiel-5f769acf.pool.mediaWays.net

making a location of Kiel likely.

Kiel is the city where the so called 'suitcase bombers' lived. And the admin of SalafiMedia lives in Husum, a small town which is close to Kiel!