On the evening of 12 August, 2010, a member of the al-Faloja forum management team announced that the site would shut down in one week's time, for reasons that were not made clear either then or subsequently.
By the 13th of August, a notice had been posted on the front page of the site announcing that the closure would occur in one day, rather than in one week.
On the evening of 14 August, 2010, another member of the Faloja management team announced that the site would not be shutting down after all. Again, the reasons for this were left unstated.
In the intervening 48 hours, both at Faloja, and at its likely successor, Shmukh, there occurred at least two dozen discussions related to the subject of the Faloja's closure. Many of these were highly personal and emotional - not unlike watching people on a sinking ship coming to grips with their impending doom. All these discussions speak to the critical importance of the forums to the rank-and-file of the global jihad - an importance that has at least as much to do with issues of identity, community, and psychology, than with the more operational or mechanistic uses of the forums.
I'll save speculation regarding the demise of Faloja for the day when the site actually dies. In the meantime there is the issue of how this drama will effect the ties between the members and the administrators on the one hand, and the administrators and the terrorist organizations they serve on the other hand.
The rank-and-file appear to fall into two camps - those who question the behavior of the management team, and those who view the management team as beyond reproach. The latter speak loudest, to such an extent that a quiet migration of the critics to other forums (e.g. Shmukh and Tahadi) seems likely.
The terrorist organizations and their assessment of the situation will be interesting to watch. On the one hand, to the extent that Faloja continues to operate and have a following, it will remain a useful place to distribute links to videos and other communications. However the unstable behavior on the management team would appear likely to tarnish Faloja's reputation and raise doubts about whether Faloja is a site one wants to partner with. All the more so after Faloja's bizarre response to the abortive first release of AQAP's Inspire magazine.
From a counter-terrorism perspective, these back-to-back self-inflicted wounds may be the best of all possible outcomes. Attacks on the forums - regardless of their source or nature - have the short-term effect of reinforcing in the minds of jihadis the importance of their sites and what they call 'the media jihad'. As it is, Faloja comes across as a forum run by people who have no regard for their members, for the importance of preserving their site's good name and reputation, or for the role they play in the global Islamic resistance movement. If one is a jihadi, how can you help but be dispirited?
Archives of discussions related to this incident follow.
Posts at Faloja regarding the imminent closure of Faloja:
• Thread 129989: page 1, page 2, page 3, page 4
• Thread 129991
• Thread 130030
• Thread 130038
• Thread 130044
• Thread 130046
• Thread 130075
Posts at Shmukh regarding the imminent closure of Faloja:
• Thread 66806
• Thread 66884
• Thread 66888
• Thread 66906
• Thread 66957
• Thread 66958
• Thread 66963
• Thread 66999
• Thread 67005
• Thread 67037
• Thread 67053
• Thread 67061
• Thread 67074
• Thread 67116
• Thread 67123
• Thread 67160
• Thread 67168
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