Al Qaeda launches English-language magazine

Front page of Inspire issue 1.

By Zhang Wen and Liu Dong

While the US and NATO are still trying to dismantle Al Qaeda leaderships in various spots around the world, Al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) published its first English-language propaganda magazine this week.

The Web-based journal, Inspire, is intended for the aspiring jihadist among English speakers, who may be located in the US, the UK or Australia, AP reported.

The Daily Beast quoted a US counter-terrorism official as saying that "the packaging may be slick, but the contents are as vile as the authors."

The magazine will likely be a powerful online tool of recruitment, Li Wei, director of the Center for Counter-Terrorism Studies at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, told the Global Times. "An online publication provides access around the world," Li said.

It also has a famous guest writer, Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical US-born cleric now living in Yemen. Many say his online sermons have inspired several recent terrorist plots in the US.

Bruce Riedel, a Brookings Institution scholar and former CIA officer, believes it will be the start of a war on the Internet, and it is the time for the US to focus on this battlefield.

However, Evan Kohlmann, of the non-profit NEFA Foundation, told Time magazine that the threat can't be dealt with simply by blocking the website," and providing better-reasoned Islamic logic is the way to counter the publication's influence.