Al-Qaeda Online Radicalization and the Creation of Children Terrorists

Modern terrorism is continuously transforming, with the aim of adjusting the terrorist organizations to global war on terror and current counter-terrorism strategies. Such transformations include not only organizational changes, but also new operational strategies searching for the ways to increase the effectiveness of terrorist attacks. In this paper we will analyze new trends in terrorism led by al Qaeda with its newly presented concept of “leaderless jihad” and the creation of the new generation of children-terrorists. Through the ways the terrorist organizations misuse media, we will show how children could become victims of radical fundamentalist ideologies. Even though children are used more often for conducting the terrorist attacks, in this paper we will demonstrate how the misuse of media for indoctrination of children from their earliest age becomes a part of the al Qaeda’s new carefully planned educational strategy for the creation of the “children in the martyrdom culture”, with the aim of their ideological preparation for conducting terrorist attacks in the future. For the realization of such a strategy, al Qaeda uses different media contents, fully adjusted to children of different ages, and distributes them through the Internet and social networks, making them a powerful tool for conducting such goals. New al Qaeda media strategy and its efficiently developed self-recruitment models through the Internet have contributed to that significantly, enabling creation of virtual communities for education, mutual introductions, communication and the planning of mutual activities. Such new forms of online radicalization unfold new challenges for security services and call for a creation of new methods for the prevention of misuse of media for terrorist propaganda