Uncovering the French-speaking jihadisphere: An exploratory analysis

The initiators: Ansaar.info and Minbar-Sos forums

An originator of the French-speaking jihadisphere, along with the conspiracy website La Voix des Opprimés, ³ Ansaar.info ⁴ first appeared in February 2004. It can be considered one of the first key attempts at making available a large amount of translated jihadi material to French-speaking audiences. Among many examples is the early French translation of the classical jihadi text ‘Sisters’ role in jihad’, a propaganda document initially published by Chechen militants that discusses the legitimacy of women fighting in jihad (Cook, 2005). Although precise details are not available, it is known that Ansaar.info was a static website featuring several translated jihadi documents ⁵ and a simple message board supervised by an administrator using the pseudonym ‘Abou Aymane’ (Terrorisme.net, 2004). Ansaar.info’s slogan was explicit: ‘Jihad and the rifle alone: no negotiations, no conferences and no dialogue’, a quotation borrowed from Abdullah Azzam’s most famous book, Join the Caravan (1987).

Following Ansaar’s precipitous shutdown in September 2004, another French-language jihadi website appeared to take its place: Minbar-Sos. ⁶ Established by Moez Garsallaoui, this forum was run by his wife Malika El Aroud, better known by her username ‘Oum Obeyda’ (Sciolino and Mekhennet, 2008). At that time, Garsallaoui was already a well-known jihadi militant who, between June and December 2004, established at least three other radical Islamist websites hosted in Switzerland, Canada and the Netherlands ⁷ (Cour de droit pénal du Tribunal Fédéral, 2007). Initially established to centralize fundraising for Muslim detainees and their families around the world, Minbar-Sos gradually became an online platform for inflammatory postings and exchanges of extremist material among a small but flourishing number of French-speaking jihadi sympathizers. Shortly after the temporary closure of the original forum in February 2005, Malika El Aroud was able to reactivate the site using a new address, ⁸ employing a server based in Canada (Cour de droit pénal du Tribunal Fédéral, 2007).

Following their arrest in Switzerland in February 2005, El Aroud and Garsallaoui were initially expelled to Belgium before being sentenced in June 2007 by the Swiss Federal Criminal Court for ‘supporting a criminal organization and complicity in portrayal of violence’ (Anon., 2007). Swiss court documents provide a description of the various jihadi websites run by Malika El Aroud:

These websites included in the discussion forum threads: messages of hostage-taking, attacks and threats similar to the claim by the ‘Al-Islambouli Brigades – al-Qaeda network’ of the attack against Pakistan’s Finance Minister … The websites also provided texts and documents containing jihadi propaganda and allowed, through hypertext links, access to several videos, made by supporters of radical Islamism, inciting violence. (Cour de droit pénal du Tribunal Fédéral, 2007)

For many observers, Minbar-Sos had become as much a personal platform for Malika El Aroud to promote her individual struggle, her radical views, and her book—Soldiers of Light (2004)—as a virtual platform for the dissemination of jihadi propaganda targeted at French-speaking jihadi sympathizers. For Malika El Aroud, support of the global jihadi narrative appeared to have become a lifestyle that could not be detached from her own personal story (Bloom, 2011: 197–206).

Despite several prolonged disappearances, Minbar-Sos continued to operate until the arrest in December 2008 of Malika El Aroud and five men suspected by the Belgian police of belonging to a terrorist cell planning suicide attacks during a European summit in Brussels (Erlanger, 2008). Under Belgian law, El Aroud was initially released by the police, but then arrested again for her alleged involvement in terrorist activities and finally sentenced to eight years in prison in May 2010 (Anon, 2010b; Hammouche, 2010). It seems clear that during 2007–2008 Minbar-Sos had become more than just a discussion forum for jihadi sympathizers and had additionally begun facilitating ‘real world’ connections between militants who then travelled to Pakistani tribal areas in order to join terrorist training camps (Cruickshank, 2009; Renard, 2009). The centrality of Minbar-Sos in the recruitment of jihadi volunteers during this period should not be overestimated, however. While some members of the cell might have entered into contact with Malika El Aroud directly through the Minbar-Sos forum, it appears that Moez Garsallaoui was, at the same time, actively trying to recruit young Muslims in person in the streets and mosques of Brussels (Renard, 2009). In this case, as in many others, the internet should be seen as a complement in the radicalization and recruitment process rather than a substitute for face-to-face interactions. After five years of irregular online activity, Minbar-Sos went offline in early 2009 and has not reappeared.

Ribaat.org: the not-so-virtual connections

Closely associated with Ansaar.info and Minbar-Sos, another French-language jihadi forum also appeared in 2004: Assabyle.com ⁹ was renamed Ribaat.org ¹⁰ after a trial in Brussels in 2006 (Anon, 2006; Borloo, 2006). Ribaat.org, also known online as ‘al-Mourabitoune’, was a discussion forum created and run by Abdel Rahman Ayachi and Raphael Gendron, young Frenchmen settled in Belgium. Ribaat.org became well-known for the translation, jointly with the Minbar-Sos forum, of many official statements emanating from jihadi media outlets such as al-Qaeda’s as-Sahab, the Global Islamic Media Front (GIMF), al-Farj Media Center, etc. Ribaat.org was also a regular place for online preaching by several extremist figures close to the Algerian Islamist movement, especially the Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat (GSPC) (Chichizola, 2006).

While in cyberspace, Minbar-Sos and Ribaat.org were characterized by ideological proximity and reciprocal hyperlinks, these forums also reflected a physical proximity between the people who were running them. Malika El Aroud and Raphael Gendron were both members of the same Salafi network established in Sint-Jans-Molenbeek around a Franco-Syrian imam and head of the Belgium Islamic Center (BIC) named Bassam Ayachi (Planchar, 2009). In 1999, Ayachi officiated at the wedding of Malika El Aroud to the Tunisian Abdessatar Dahmane, the fake ‘reporter’ who killed Ahmed Shah Massoud two days before September 11, 2001 (Planchar, 2003). Raphael Gendron was equally close to Ayachi and his son Abdel Rahman, with whom he co-managed Ribaat.org. The November 2008 arrest in Italy of Bassam Ayachi and Gendron eventually shed light on the ramifications of this network, which was operating as much on the internet as through interpersonal relationships (Crumley, 2009). Essentially, the connections between Minbar-Sos and Ribaat.org were not only virtual, but mirrored ‘real life’ interactions.

Despite the arrests of Bassam Ayachi and Gendron, the Ribaat.org forum continued to operate, probably under the control of Abdel Rahman Ayachi. The site was finally shut down in mid-2009, but was replaced shortly afterwards by an English website known as Word of Islam, at the same address. ¹¹ Word of Islam is a huge URL directory providing links to, amongst others, some of the most active Arabic-language jihadi forums, such as Al-Faloja, As-Ansar, Al-Jahafal, Al-Qimmah, along with jihadi forums addressing English-, German- and Russian-speaking audiences.

The successor: Ansar al-Haqq

Following the closure of Minbar-Sos and then Ribaat.org, until that time the most active jihadi websites available in French, jihadi sympathizers gradually moved to an alternative forum created in December 2006: Ansar al-Haqq. ¹² In the immediate aftermath of this move, it was not uncommon for new users of al-Haqq to mention their past membership of either one or both of Minbar-Sos and Ribaat.org forums:

Currently hosted on a Malaysian server, the Ansar al-Haqq forum demonstrates strong support for violent jihadism as underscored by its graphic design, the type of content made available via the site, and discussion topics among its registered members. Even if the forum may at first appear Salafi-oriented, but essentially apolitical, it is unquestionably promoting a jihadi narrative as evidenced by the extensive collection of radical texts written by jihadi ideologues, such as Abdullah Azzam, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, Abu Basir al-Tartusi, Sheikh Atiyatullah and even the recently killed American-born jihadi ideologue Anwar al-Awlaki, and downloadable from Ansar al-Haqq. ¹³ Furthermore, Ansar al-Haqq, like many other jihadi forums, includes a large subsection delivering news and official statements released by various terrorist groups from around the world, including al-Qaeda central, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the Islamic State of Iraq, and even Chechen militants from the Islamic Emirate of the Caucasus. Frequently updated, this subsection entitled ‘Official News from the Mujahideen’ allows forum members to check and comment on the latest news distributed by miscellaneous jihadi media outlets. More recently, Ansar al-Haqq has begun publishing its own material aimed at French-speaking audiences. Beginning in mid-2008, Ansar al-Haqq has to date released four issues of its own French-language magazine, Labbayk Ya Oummati.

Ansar al-Haqq is a heavily trafficked, content-rich French-language site, indicating that there seems to be a clear appetite for this type of content and discussion amongst French-speaking internet users. The likelihood then is that this is not the only French-language site of its type in existence. The next section therefore seeks to uncover the larger French-speaking jihadisphere.

Methodology: Network analysis and snowball sampling

This research was driven by the question of whether there is in existence a French-speaking jihadisphere. The methodology employed to determine this fits within the general network analysis paradigm. Network analysis can be a very useful tool to employ to determine the existence of and explore online jihadi activities. Simply put, network analysis provides a method for collecting data about a set of nodes (i.e., webpages, forums, blogs) and to examine ties that link one node to another (Marin and Wellman, 2010). In doing so, it allows the researcher to gather information that will, for example, allow him or her to evaluate the scale of an entire network. Several network research designs have been developed in the past few years, but not all of them can be applied in order to explore the scope of the contemporary French-speaking jihadisphere.

On one side are whole-network methods. These approaches yield the maximum information, but they can also be very costly, difficult to execute, and hard to generalize (Hanneman and Riddle, 2005). Whole-networks are traditionally used to describe the relationships within a clearly demarcated group of networked objects. Usually, within a whole-network analysis, the researcher poses questions about the dynamics of the overall group structure, the particular location of some network members, or the importance of preeminent nodes in relation to others (Carrington et al., 2005). Even if whole-network methods have numerous advantages, deciding on the set of objects or actors to be included within the sampled network can be quite complicated, especially in the case of jihadi websites that vacillate between active and inactive states, thus making them difficult to follow and capture.

On the other side are partial-network methods that resemble some of the conventional methods used in the social sciences, which are essentially based on the application of snowball sampling (Goodman, 1961). One of the most straightforward partial-network methods employed for website analysis is link analysis (Thelwall, 2004). It consists of tracking online connections across websites via hyperlinks (URLs). The data collection can start with a single webpage (the focal website) and the links contained therein, then follow and collect all the pages linked from these, and so on.

Data aggregation for the research presented herein began with a focal website: the Ansar al-Haqq forum. All links from this site were identified, and each ‘new’ website was searched for all URLs linking to other jihadi websites, and so on until all ‘new’ links identified were either already recorded or were irrelevant to the research. In this study, the snowball sampling was achieved by using URL extracting software called ‘Web Data Extractor’. ¹⁴ To precisely define the borders of the data corpus, it was decided to apply two main criteria for selecting which websites should be included or, alternatively, excluded. The first criterion was obviously language, thus all the websites identified should be wholly or mainly in French. The second criterion was the extremist character of the website content: only websites displaying a clear support for terrorist violence, violent jihadism and/or jihadi terrorist groups were included in the data set. Islamist, including Salafi, websites that did not contain any violent radical content were systematically excluded from the sample analyzed in the following sections. The purpose of this was to compile all links listed on French-language jihadi websites as well as those cited in forum threads, subsections and postings in order to build-up as comprehensive a picture as possible of the French-speaking jihadisphere.

Preliminary findings: A small-scale yet existing French-speaking jihadisphere

The initial URL extraction from the Ansar al-Haqq forum led to the collection of 48 new links. After manual verification, only 10 websites matched the selection criteria detailed above. Accordingly, all other webpages were excluded from the next step of the sampling process, which required the identification of all relevant links from these 10 jihadi websites, and so on until a final dataset consisting of 64 URLs was compiled. Having identified, analyzed, and classified these 64 jihadi websites, it is possible to make a preliminary assessment of the French-speaking jihadisphere.

The network analysis revealed the existence of numerous webpages actively sustaining jihadi discourse and promoting extremist material amongst French-speaking audiences. There is an active French-language jihadisphere in existence, in other words. The latter appears relatively small, however, and composed mainly of static websites and blogs (approx. 91%). ¹⁵ Although they accounted for only 9 percent of all the URLs aggregated, discussion forums and message boards are nevertheless the preferred platform for the dissemination of French-language jihadi propaganda. In fact, a cross-sectional analysis suggests that the forums offer a much wider choice of translated material, both in terms of quantity and diversity, than other platforms. Forums are also much quicker than the latter to publish statements issued by terrorist leaders and organizations; only messages coming from the most important jihadist leaders, such as the late Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, gain the attention of the administrators of traditional websites. A majority of the static jihadi websites/blogs analyzed also contained very similar collections of French translations of ‘classic’ texts written by celebrity extremist preachers such as Abdullah Azzam, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, and Anwar al-Awlaki. Discussion forums, on the other hand, offer much greater diversity of access to violent radical literature since these websites not only make available classical jihadi texts, but also eagerly publicize original French-language analyses such as ‘Salafiyya jihadiyya, la France, Nous et les autres’ (Salafiyya jihadiyya, France, We and the others) (Abou Ishaq Saif Al Masoul, 2007). So even if the French-speaking jihadisphere appears mainly composed of static websites and blogs, the heart of its activity clearly revolves around discussion forums and message boards.

While six French-language jihadi forums were identified in the URL collection, three are currently closed: Minbar-Sos, Ribaat.org, and Le Sentier des Itinérants. Preliminary findings therefore show that the French-speaking jihadisphere coalesces around just three currently active forums: Ansar al-Haqq, Le Jardin des Croyantes, and Nidâ² At-Tawhîd (Figure 1). This is a relatively small-scale network, even if there are clearly overlapping activities and strong URL connections amongst these forums.

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Figure 1.

Network visualization of the French-speaking jihadisphere (forums only).

The over-involvement of a small group

The level of online involvement of Ansar al-Haqq’s 2517 registered users is neither consistent nor homogeneous. Indeed, the audience of the forum is clearly divided between a huge majority of passive users and a small minority of active members who are nevertheless extremely effective in maintaining the continuous flow of discussions and the dissemination of jihadi content. Between its creation in December 2006 and March 2011, 48,073 messages were posted on the message board, an average of 19 messages per user. This very low average figure is in contrast to the very heavy involvement of a small yet zealous cluster of 130–140 French-speaking jihadi sympathizers who compose the majority of posters. In fact, the 10 most active forum users have contributed more than 16 percent of all Ansar al-Haqq’s published postings during the same period (see Table 1). In this respect then, jihadi forums are no different from ‘normal’ message boards.

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Table 1.

Top ten users―Ansar al-Haqq (March 2011)

Rank	Member	Number of postings
1	Ibnoul ISLAM	1653
2	As-Sajda	1284
3	Abou Moss3ab	642
4	Aboû Oussâma	635
5	Abu Zubaydah	629
6	Oum Maysara	610
7	Abou Mous’ab Almouhjir	606
8	Houcine	587
9	Abou Salamane	551
10	Abou Zakariya al-Maghrebi	549

Many academic studies have already shown that the internet clearly fosters the over-involvement of a small number of active users who contribute relentlessly to the life of cyber-communities, but who coexist with much greater numbers of passive consumers of the content and discussion on the same sites (Leimeister and Krcmar, 2005: 140–141; Silverstone, 2005: 66–70). As can be seen above, the data gathered perfectly illustrate this extreme concentration of online activities among few users deeply embedded in the everyday life of Ansar al-Haqq. A similar tendency was observed in the forum sub-section ‘Official News from the Mujahideen’, where no more than 20 registered users are eagerly pursuing the translation and editing of official statements released by jihadi media outlets from around the globe. Unsurprisingly, this over-involvement of a small cluster of online sympathizers seems to be a recurring phenomenon within virtual jihadi communities as previously remarked upon by Akil N Awan. His (2007: 78) examination of the English-language forum Mujahedon.net ¹⁶ led him to conclude that ‘the vast majority of messages posted on the forum originated with a very small core group of active users: 99% were passive or casual users’, a proportion quite similar to that observed in the case of the Ansar al-Haqq forum.

Women’s mobilization in the French-speaking jihadisphere

The present research determined, on the basis of publicly accessible data, that the Ansar al-Haqq forum, in March 2011, was rallying a total of 2517 users, of which 26.6 percent were registered as women, 61 percent as men, and 12.4 percent did not specify their gender. Certainly, some user profiles might contain spoof information, however it is strongly believed that these statistics fairly accurately depict the demographic reality of Ansar al-Haqq users. For many, the surprising thing with respect to these figures may be the relatively high percentage of women present on the Ansar al-Haqq forum. Three explanations may be advanced to explain this phenomenon: first, the symbolic influence of ‘Oum Obeyda’ (aka Malika El Aroud) should not be underestimated. Aroud was a strong role model for women’s mobilization not just within the French-speaking jihadisphere, but the global online movement. Both the American Colleen R LaRose (aka ‘JihadJane’) (see Conway and McInerney, 2012) and the Senegal-based Islamist Barbara Aisha Farina ¹⁷ created user profiles on the Ansar al-Haqq forum (Urbina, 2010), for example. ¹⁸ Second, several women—particularly a forum member using the pseudonym ‘Oum Majda’—hold influential positions as forum administrators on al-Haqq thus potentially attracting other female militants who might originally have been ambivalent about their involvement in such radical discussion forums. Finally, the close virtual connections between the Ansar al-Haqq forum and another French-speaking Salafi-jihadi forum known as Le Jardin des Croyantes, whose access is exclusive to women, may have helped to foster the circulation of female users between the two websites. The significant number of females among Ansar al-Haqq users adds credence to the argument that the internet has now become an important space of engagement for female supporters of the jihadi narrative (Bloom, 2011; Mostarom and Azalin, 2010). In the last two years, jihadi forums have been increasingly framed as legitimate platforms for female jihadi engagement. Consequently, material encouraging women to take a more active role in supporting a violent radical agenda has been widely distributed, translated and circulated. The latest example of this trend is the release of al-Shamikha (i.e. ‘Majestic’) magazine by al Fajr Media Center in March 2011 (Cavendish, 2011). In the context of the French-speaking jihadisphere, several texts currently accessible via the Ansar al-Haqq forum similarly endorse this discourse of female mobilization in support of the jihadi cause. ¹⁹

The constitution of an online jihadi community: How did users come to join the Ansar al-Haqq forum?

This sub-section examines a particular point of interest: the constitution dynamics of the Ansar al-Haqq forum understood as a virtual jihadi community. It attempts to identify key bridges for accessing jihadi websites by mapping the trajectory of Ansar al-Haqq users to the site. Indeed, the most interesting feature of the analysis of this message board was undeniably the ability to identify how its members originally became aware of its existence. How, it was wondered, did people initially come to join an online community such as Ansar al-Haqq that openly supports a violent radical agenda? What were the online and/or offline bridges that led them to access Ansar al-Haqq in the first instance?

Based on freely accessible data collected from each user’s profile page, the author determined a series of key channels through which users eventually came to visit the Ansar al-Haqq forum. Indeed, when registering to gain access to the message board, each new member is required to provide answers to a series of questions, including ‘How did you get to know about the forum?’ After extracting individual responses from all members’ profile pages, it was decided to classify these into five different categories:

The data show that a majority of Ansar al-Haqq’s registered users became aware of its existence through two major channels: online bridges and real life social bonds (Figure 2). In answer to the question ‘How did you get to know about the forum?’, 51 percent of Ansar al-Haqq members declared that they initially accessed the website via online bridges.

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Figure 2.

‘How did you get to know about this forum?’ (March 2011)

Below are some sample responses extracted from users’ profile pages:

Mollahomar

How did you get to know about the forum?

‘Internet’

Um 3abdillah

How did you get to know about the forum?

‘Through Le Jardin des Croyantes forum’

Al-Filistini

How did you get to know about the forum?

‘Forum Ribaat’

This is not greatly surprising given that the internet has a network-based architecture with the central purpose of linking disparate nodes; its design therefore facilitates easy hyperlink connectivity. Accordingly, these findings seem to reinforce the argument in favor of substantial numbers of ‘disconnected’ jihadi sympathizers joining extremist-oriented cyber-communities via online bridges.

A more detailed analysis of the data can help to better understand the role of online bridges (i.e. other jihadi websites, chat-rooms, video-sharing portals and social network platforms) in users’ decisions to access Ansar al-Haqq in the first place. By consulting disaggregated data, it was learned that nearly half of all those forum users who first accessed al-Haqq via online bridges indicated that this original access was via other jihadi websites and forums (see Figure 3). Due to the small size of the French-speaking jihadisphere, it seems likely that the launch of a new French-language jihadi website would quickly be relayed among other jihadi websites, which can explain the increased flow of new members to the Ansar al-Haqq forum observed in the aftermath of Minbar-Sos and Ribaat.org’s closures. French-language jihadi forums are at the top of the list of those jihadi websites frequently cited by Ansar al-Haqq users as a discovery pathway, and include Ribaat.org (41%), Minbar-Sos (21%), Le Jardin des Croyantes (16%), and Nidâ² At-Tawhîd (7%). Interestingly, only a few users mentioned well-known Arabic-speaking forums, such as al-Ekhlaas (5%), as their online bridge to al-Haqq, which suggests that the French-speaking jihadisphere is very ‘French-centric’ and only loosely connected to the rest of the global jihadisphere.

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Figure 3.

‘How did you get to know about this forum?’ (March 2011).

Additionally, numerous Ansar al-Haqq members indicated that they connected with the forum through other platforms, such as chat-rooms (e.g. Paltalk), video-sharing portals (e.g. YouTube, Dailymotion, Google Videos, Metacafe) and, albeit less commonly, social networking sites (e.g. Facebook).

Paltalk is one of the most popular internet chat services. It features thousands of chat-rooms on a vast range of topics and allows its users to communicate via instant messaging, voice and video chat. Paltalk has been described by terrorism analysts as an antechamber for radicalization, fostering exchanges between jihadi sympathizers around the world (Kohlmann, 2005). In recent years, Paltalk has been used extensively by extremist preachers like Omar Bakri Mohammed, Sheikh Abdullah al-Faisal and many amateurish ‘wannabe’ jihadi ideologues such as administrators of the English-speaking website RevolutionMuslim.com ²⁰ in their attempts to recruit new followers (Cruickshank, 2010; Somaiya, 2010; Zelin, 2010). While the use of Paltalk to disseminate violent extremist propaganda is nothing new, either amongst jihadis or adherents of other radical movements (i.e. violent far-right militias in the US), the data presented in Figure 3 further confirm its function in sustaining online jihadism, albeit in a minor way with respect to how al-Haqq members first learned of the forum, which is not to say that it is not used more extensively by forum members in other capacities.

Video-sharing portals (e.g. YouTube, Dailymotion, Google Videos, Metacafe) have also emerged as new bridges to capture potential sympathizers (Goldenberg, 2006; McGregor, 2007; Shane, 2011) while at the same time raising complex issues of ‘self-’ or ‘auto-radicalization’ (Conway and McInerney, 2008). Even if only 2 percent of Ansar al-Haqq users acknowledged video-sharing websites as playing a role in their original exposure to the forum, this figure nevertheless sheds light on the fact that these platforms are not just isolated hosts of jihadi content, but can act as bridges into the global jihadisphere. Video-sharing sites allow any internet user to become progressively more familiar with jihadi material and then navigate to dedicated jihadi websites thus opening the possibility for individuals, even those with little or no apparent prior interest in violent jihadism, to become ensnared in the global jihadisphere.

Finally, Facebook was only mentioned by a small minority of Ansar al-Haqq users. Even if some jihadi media groups have been active on Facebook (Al-Shishani, 2010), the social networking service does not appear to be a privileged way to connect with new followers. Several reasons may be posited for this, including that ‘administrators can easily close or remove controversial groups, intelligence agencies can see easily who accesses these groups and Facebook seems to attract a relatively liberal crowd’ (Hegghammer, cited in Al-Shishani, 2010: 3–4).

In sum, the data presented above reflect the flourishing and multi-layered dynamics of online bridges, as well as their key role in channeling users to jihadi websites. At the same time, they also appear to have a central role in structuring the trajectory by which potential followers are gradually exposed to and familiarized with violent online jihadism. In his book Au Coeur de l’Antiterrorisme (In the Heart of Anti-Terrorism) (2011: 221), the French anti-terrorist judge Marc Trévidic relates a discussion between himself and a terrorist suspect that fairly depicts these trends:

Is a virtual jihadi community only virtual?

In the preceding section, it was reported that the majority of Ansar al-Haqq users (51%) became acquainted with the forum via online bridges. On the other hand, 41% of Ansar al-Haqq users indicated that they heard about the forum via real life social bonds (i.e. friends, family, word of mouth). Below are some sample responses to the question ‘How did you get to know about the forum’ extracted from these users’ profile pages:

While these figures might suggest contradictory trends, they should be interpreted instead as two sides of the same coin. In the past decade, many studies have explored in great detail the virtual dimensions of extremist cyber-communities (see, for example, Bowman-Grieve, 2009; Bowman-Grieve and Conway, 2012). Much of this research questioned whether these virtual communities could function in ways that would allow their members to match the accomplishments of offline extremist groups. Such dichotomization is, however, problematic because it minimizes the ‘real world’ ramifications of virtual communities while at the same time potentially overestimating the levels of social interaction taking place in cyberspace.

There are, without doubt, some limitations to this single case study. Nevertheless, collected responses from Ansar al-Haqq users’ profiles certainly demonstrate that a large number of them gained knowledge about the forum via real-life social bonds, that is to say through personal acquaintances who already knew of the existence of the site. These figures should push scholars to consider more seriously the argument for dual violent radical socialization processes taking place simultaneously across online extremist forums and pre-existing offline social networks. Indeed, the socialization of jihadi sympathizers does not necessarily have to be compartmentalized into online interactions on the one hand and offline social ties on the other. If online communication increases the frequency of weak ties and indirectly raises the ‘Strength of Weak Ties’ hypothesis (Kennedy and Weimann, 2011), it seems quite dangerous from an analytical standpoint to make a clear distinction between online and offline audiences, especially when it comes to understanding the effects of individual exposure to radical discourse and extremist material. Interconnection dynamics between radical cyber-communities and pre-existing ‘real life’ Salafi-jihadi networks should be recast into a less binary opposition. The decision to register on jihadi websites might often reflect the identification of individuals with radical elements already circulating around them in their close personal social network. As stated by Marc Sageman (2008: 121): ‘The overall situation is therefore more complicated than just pure online or offline networks. They are networks within networks, offline and online links, which cross geography and time.’

A detailed look at the history of the French-speaking jihadisphere should convince us that ‘real life’ interactions between members of radical cyber-communities are neither exceptional nor inconsequential. Many of these extremist virtual environments are influenced and shaped by real world factors. The examples of Minbar-Sos and Ribaat.org forums, discussed earlier, are instructive. The administrators of these—Malika El Aroud, Raphael Gendron, Abdel Rahman Ayachi, and Bassam Ayachi—knew each other in ‘real life’ for many years and combined face-to-face socialization within a small-scale radical network in Sint-Jans-Molenbeek with an extensive range of online interactions. During all this period they appeared to be largely mirroring in cyberspace their preexisting ‘real life’ community in a small Belgian town. Moreover, the dual online–offline life of this Salafi-jihadi network still endures today, the arrest and imprisonment of its main protagonists notwithstanding. Sentenced to eight years in prison in May 2010 (Hammouche, 2010), Malika El Aroud continues to appeal as a role model for many members of the Ansar al-Haqq community with a member using the pseudonym ‘Oum Usama’ actively posting the content of what she claims are letters written by El Aroud in her cell to the forum (Forum Ansar al-Haqq, 2011d). El Aroud thus continues to pursue the extended conversation with online sympathizers that she inaugurated with the creation of Minbar-Sos.