The Blog

Leveling the Cyberfield

3:52 PM, Mar 22, 2008 • By MICHAEL GOLDFARB
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Reuters reports:

The U.S. military said on Saturday it had hampered al Qaeda's ability to recruit new members in Iraq by capturing or killing many of the people who make slick videos used to attract disaffected young Muslims.

U.S. military spokesman Rear Admiral Greg Smith said that in the past year, 39 al Qaeda members in Iraq responsible for producing and disseminating videos and other material to thousands of Internet Web sites had been captured or killed....

Smith said there has been a steady decline in videos broadcast on 5,000 pro-al Qaeda Web sites since June 2007, roughly coinciding with falling levels of violence across Iraq.

I heard Gen. Wallace speak on this subject a little more than a year ago. At the time he said that al Qaeda had a "better information operations capability" than the U.S. military and that the group had benefited from the "sanctuary of cyberspace." It looks like killing the bad guys has had a salutary effect on the situation (surprise!). Last fall Roggio wrote about the hunt for AQI's propaganda cells, which have been a top priority of U.S. forces since last summer.

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