Jihadi Forums

Anyone else having problems with al-Falluja (not spelled that way in the address)? Of course, this is the problem with following jihadi forums, as the loss of al-Ikhlas last September showed us all.

Speaking of al-Ikhlas, I was listening to NPR yesterday and heard this report by Dina Temple-Raston on a training manual that was uncovered by the team at West Point, and then I heard this line: “Researchers at West Point recently stumbled on the 51-page manual while they were visiting a jihadi chat room, called Ecles.”

Predictably, the line sent me into a panic until I was figured out that the report was actually referring to al-Ikhlas, but failed to mention that the forum is no longer active. (The pronunciation didn’t help either.) Periodically, I have problems with some of the interesting transliterations of English words into Arabic, but now we have curious transliterations of Arabic words into English – at times the two seem more like their own pidgin languages than poor mirrors of the original.

Update: The forum is back up.