A Pentagon research team monitors more than 5,000 jehadist Web sites, focusing daily on the 25 to 100 most hostile and active, reports the AP, a news agency. The news is not a revealing one as the intensive use of the internet is expected from jehadists who in turn are successful to rope in gullible Muslims from South Asian countries.



The team includes 25 linguists, who cover multiple dialects of the Arabic language and provide reports on events sparking anger on extremist Web sites, Dan Devlin, a Pentagon public diplomacy specialist, said on May 04. The researchers, for instance, focused in November on the backlash caused by the Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad.



Devlin testified to Congress as part of a briefing on how terrorists use the Internet. Extremist propaganda is most often used to recruit jehadist fighters and supporters between the ages of 7 and 25, the officials said. But “we’ve seen products that are aimed at ages even lower than 7,” testified Pentagon contractor Ron Roughhead. His company wasn’t identified, for security reasons.



According to the briefing, al-Qaeda has advertised online to fill jobs for Internet specialists, and its media group has distributed computer games and recruitment videos that use everything from poetry to humour to false information to gather support. The media group has assembled montages of American politicians taking aim at the Arab world.