Interested in anti-terrorism intelligence? Interested in the fast-evolving role of the Internet? Interested in the story of a woman who is a kind of freelance spy? Interested, perhaps, in some intriguing and disturbing ideas about what motivates radical Islamist terrorists, including their religion? Then check out this piece, “Private Jihad,” in the May 29th issue of The New Yorker, by Benjamin Wallace-Wells.
The story profiles an Iraqi-born American named Rita Katz. (Her family is Jewish, which plays significantly into her story.) As the head of Search for International Terrorist Entities, or SITE Institute, she spends her days pouring over radical Islamist and known terrorist Web sites, feeding information to a variety of paying clients, including some branches of the U.S. government. Here’s a sample:
At the SITE office, Katz showed me some suicide-bombing videos from Iraq. They are often five or ten minutes long, overlaid with religious chanting. In one video, a middle-aged Iraqi doctor straps on a suicide vest. “In Israel, they always told you that the profile of a suicide bomber was someone young, without family, from the lowest economic level, but what we see here over and over is just the opposite,” Katz said.
We watched the last day in the life of Abu Mouwayia al-Shimali, a chubby, bespectacled Saudi. Shimali discusses a letter purportedly written by a female prisoner at Abu Ghraib named Fatima, describing nightly public rapes of female prisoners by American guards. The letter is apocryphal, but it has circulated widely online, and has become a rallying point for the Iraqi insurgency. Shimali does not sound unhinged or bloodthirsty; he sounds humble.
Shimali is shown waving as he walks to a car. Then he is in the driver’s seat, with a rifle in his lap, patting a clunky metal apparatus next to him. His smile is warm, and he is speaking in a measured tone. “He is saying, ‘This is my bomb,’ ” Katz translated. The car pulls up to a dusty checkpoint manned by American and Iraqi soldiers, and then explodes. SITE distributed the video two days after it was posted. As you watch, it feels not like an advertisement for homicide but like an advertisement for belief. Katz told me that even she, watching such videos, could imagine wanting to become a suicide bomber.
