The Austin bombings are a chilling reminder that all online bombmaking tutorials posted by terrorist groups…
The Austin bombings are a chilling reminder that all online bombmaking tutorials posted by terrorist groups are essentially shared community content, easily accessible for extremists of all stripes to consume and put into action.
Millennial serial bomber Mark Anthony Conditt took at least some of his motivations to his grave, and authorities are investigating how he acquired the knowledge to build his package and tripwire bombs. But for years, terrorist groups have ensured that anyone looking to bomb innocents can find sophisticated recipes and tips to wage explosive campaigns.
The cover of the May 2016 issue of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s Inspire magazine showed a hooded figure lurking outside of a well-lit, idyllic family home, setting the eerie scene for their tutorial on constructing explosive devices for residential assassination operations.
Three bomb recipes were offered along with DIY photo instructions: the parcel bomb, the magnetic car bomb and the door-trap bomb.
The parcel bomb instructions showed how to construct a circuit triggered by opening the package or the contents within; Al Qaeda demonstrated the recipe by putting the bomb within a book in the package. “These are different types of packages you can chose from depending on the size of the bomb and weight of package,” the terror group said, showing everything from a gift box with an elegant bow to a simple shoebox. “Experiment many times until you are skilled enough with the circuitry aspect of them.”
In a 2015 issue of Inspire magazine, detailed step-by-step instructions showed how to make a homemade “hand grenade” — a shrapnel-packed pipe bomb with a 9-volt battery, wires and an altered green Christmas tree bulb to put a three-second delay on the circuit.
After Akayed Ullah was charged with trying to detonate a bomb in a Manhattan Port Authority Bus Terminal tunnel in December, the criminal complaint said his explosive device “was comprised of a metal pipe, which Ullah filled with explosive material that he created” and metal screws as shrapnel, using “Christmas tree lights, wires, and a nine-volt battery as a trigger to detonate the pipe bomb.”
Ullah reportedly claimed allegiance to the Islamic State while acknowledging he found the Al Qaeda bomb recipe online, underscoring again how all terror education in the error of online training is universal and seamlessly crosses allegiances and ideologies.
Conditt had a 19-day run of successful experimentation with various explosive mechanisms that will make would-be bombers of all motivational stripes sit up and take notice. The combination of leaving deadly packages on doorsteps, setting up a roadside IED in a quiet neighborhood, and dropping bombs into the FedEx system will undoubtedly pique the curiosity of lone jihadists who have been urged to reconsider a one-hit martyrdom mission and instead really terrorize a city with a series of smaller, unlikely attacks.
It’s a brutal reminder that the kind of scripted violence intended to paralyze a community — whether buoyed by an ideological motive or purely a sociopathic personality — benefits from the terror consortium crafted through years of encyclopedic reference guides methodically tucked into so many corners of the internet that it’s impossible for counterterrorism efforts to bottle up the open-source training resources. These easily accessible guides on staging various kinds of attacks and piecing together myriad incendiary devices are out there for anyone to use, whether an Islamic jihadist, a violent white supremacist or a killer with little apparent motive other than wanting to inflict mass casualties.
Terrorist organizations have done more than create a catalogue of internal tutorials for bombmakers who’ve committed their task to the cause of jihad, they’ve become contributing editors to the 21st century-edition of “The Anarchist Cookbook.” These cookbooks, to the concern of law enforcement, have an even broader reach — just log on to the internet instead of rooting through alternative bookshops.
Johnson is a senior fellow with the news and public policy group Haym Salomon Center and D. C. bureau chief for PJ Media.
