222467to222472

The Multi-faceted Roles of Women Inside Al-Qaeda
ID Title Postings
60 Al Qaeda en Irak s'allie
avec d'autres groupes de
Mujahideens – Al Qaeda
in Iraq joins forces with
other groups of
Mujahedeens
Volume
(char)
Duration
(days)
Members
Active
Members
11 16621 244 4 2
The content of the website minbar-sos is both radical and very aggressive. When
the user clicks on the link “al Qaeda” he or she is greeted by video messages from
Ayman al Zawahiri. From the link “Djihad fissabilillah”, the user obtains access to
videos and information about the “Islamic resistance in Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq
and Chechnya”. Overall, it is a professionally made radical Islamist website.
With the variable “hot threads” it is possible to identify the threads that are of
particularly interest to the forum members. The “hottest threads” have been marked
with red. The topics of the threads are not typically women’s issues but rather
highly political daily news topics. The situation in Somalia (ID 1138), Palestine
(ID 894) and Iraq (ID 60) received a very high level of interest in the forum. The
users who are assumed to be females due to their user names have a strong interest
in politics, and issues such as family or children do not play a leading role in this
debate. Given the usage of the French language, it is obvious that French is the
second mother tongue for a large number of participants, but the orthography and
punctuation as well as logical stringency is riddled with errors. Additionally, the
educational background of the authors seems to be very low.
The level of radical thinking is sometimes very high. For instance, one forum
member with a female user name, identifying herself as a 20-year-old, posted that
although she was trained in a women’s unit, the division between men and women
persists, and female fighters keep to themselves under male command.
The only “hot thread” identified in this study specifically dealing with the issue
women and their role in the Jihad is “Les soeurs et le jihad”. In this “hot thread”,
posts commending the female fighters in Chechnya can be found as well as
discussions about the permissibility of female suicide bombers. In general, the
women in this thread exchanged their views in a very self-confident manner and
their postings do not appear much different with respect to topic and content from
those posted by participants with male user names in related forums.
In all four of the web forums reviewed, a core set of members contributed the
majority of the posts. It will be assumed that the members in these core sets
function as opinion leaders for the specific thread and forum. For instance, the top
10 members of Ummah contributed 32% of the total posts and the top 10 members
147