Samir Khan: American Blogger and Al Qaeda Propagandist
Introduction
Posted: February 6, 2008
Updated: October 1, 2011
Samir Khan, a 24-year-old American known for distributing terrorist propaganda material online, was killed by a U.S. drone strike on September 30, 2011, two years after he moved to Yemen to align himself with Al Qaeda.
Federal authorities have claimed that Khan was the principal author of Inspire, Al Qaeda's first-ever English-language magazine that provides detailed bomb-making instructions and calls on followers to "destroy" America. The graphics, design and overall packaging of Inspire resemble those on Khan's various blogs and in Jihad Recollections, the self-described "first English Jihad magazine" in which Khan was a contributor.
The inaugural issue of Inspire was released online in July 2010 by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), Al Qaeda's affiliate in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, where Khan has lived since October 2009. In the second issue, which was released in October 2010, Khan writes that he is "proud to be a traitor to America" and criticizes the U.S. government and its military incursions overseas. The U.S. and its allies, according to Khan, must be defeated in order to "implant Islam all over the world." "I am acutely aware that body parts have to be torn apart, skulls have to be crushed and blood has to be spilled," Khan writes.
In the seventh issue of Inspire, published just days before his death, Khan underscored the importance of media for the global jihadist movement, noting that "ideas are bulletproof and have an outstanding lifespan," and that therefore "the credible ideas that we bring is what intimidates them [the West] the most."
Prior to moving to Yemen, Khan was a significant distributor of Jihadist propaganda on the Internet. Known online as inshaAllhashaheed (Arabic for "God willing a martyr"), Khan used various blogs to distribute English translations of Al Qaeda materials, links to videos produced by terrorist groups, and original commentary in support of violence. He currently runs a blog called Inshallahshaheed, which is hosted on the server of the Ansar Al-Mujahideen Network, an English-language Web site on which users distribute jihad-related materials.
Khan was born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and moved to Queens, New York, with his family when he was seven. As a teenager, Khan become involved with the local branch of Tanzeem-e-Islami, a radical anti-Semitic group based in Pakistan. The group currently operates in the U.S. under the name Islamic Organization of North America (IONA). Khan also reportedly attended meetings of the Islamic Thinkers Society (ITS), a New York-based anti-Semitic group that supports violence in order to establish a global Islamic caliphate.
In 2004, Khan moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, with his parents. At that time, Khan used a mainstream blog hosting service to create his first blog, which mainly included materials about Tanzeem-e-Islami. He later created several other blogs through Islamic Network, a blog hosting network, and began posting materials related to Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.
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