It's quaint now to remember how terrorist groups ran their publicity before the internet was invented.
At Reuters in civil-war Beirut in the early 1980s, the only clues we had to the motives behind the latest wave of bombings or assassinations were smudgy faxes in typewritten Arabic from organisations with obviously made-up names such as the "Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners".
The internet changed everything. Within six months of the 9/11 attacks in 2001, al-Qaeda had been driven out of its bases in Afghanistan but had regrouped in cyberspace. When I started exploring Islamist sites on the Net in the weeks after 9/11, I discovered there was an entire jihadi subculture in chat rooms, message boards and email lists.
Al-Qaeda itself was operating a website which gave all the information which a cell anywhere in the world would need to operate independently of the now-scattered leadership - and everything a Western journalist would need to understand why al-Qaeda had attacked America and how it planned to wage war against the West. The site even gave phone numbers of families of Al Qaeda members captured in Pakistan so sympathisers could call their families.
Five years on, the jihadi propaganda has evolved. Most of it is now near-broadcast-quality video on broadband. As I hope you'll see this Monday night in our film for Channel 4, Jihad TV, Al Qaeda and other jihadi groups in Iraq, Afghanistan and Chechnya are uploading films almost daily to the internet.
They range from short clips of US humvees being blown up to hour-long documentaries with twirling graphic effects and animation ideas borrowed from video games. Some clips are unwatchably horrific but others give a view you may never have seen of the jihadis' wars against the West. A few are just intriguing - look out for the news bulletin by men in balaclavas.
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