Al Qaeda website targets women for jihad

The Al Qaeda has launched a new internet magazine exclusively for women, report agencies.

Al Khansaa, launched last month, aims to show women how to reconcile the apparent contradiction of fighting jihad while maintaining family life, says the BBC.

Named after a famous Arab woman poet in the early days of Islam, the magazine is published by an outfit called "The Women's Media Bureau in the Arabian Peninsula".

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'And it claims that the former leader of al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia, Abd-al-Aziz al-Muqrin - who was killed by Saudi security forces in June - was one of its founders,' the BBC said.

'Linked to a sophisticated new series of militant Islamist Web sites emerging from Saudi Arabia, al-Khansaa is a disturbing pioneer in the fast-growing world of cyber jihadists,' said a CBS report.

'It represents the first time al Qaeda — a chauvinistic, conservative, Sunni Muslim-led terror network — is very publicly reaching out to women on the Internet.'

"The blood of our husbands and the body parts of our children are our sacrificial offering," it says while exhorting jihad.

According to the BBC, 'the main objective

of the magazine seems to be to teach women married to radical Islamists how to support their husbands in their conflict with the authorities. It also gives them specific advice on how to bring up their children in the path of jihad, how to provide first aid and what kind of physical training women need to prepare themselves for fighting.'

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"We will stand covered in our veils and abayas [all-encompassing robes favored by Saudi women], with our weapons in our hands and our children in our arms," says the editorial in the inaugural issue.

But, says CBS, 'even more alarming than the "feminist-jihadist" rhetoric is the fact that al Qaeda seems to be targeting a new generation of potential recruits via their mothers.'

"It's a very disturbing phenomenon," CBS quotes Rita Katz, director of SITE Institute, a Washington-based terrorism research group, as saying.

"It seeks to reach a huge, new untouched audience that will now be exposed to this dangerous message."

'The site is currently very hard to find on the Internet,' said CBS. 'The French server that inadvertently hosted the Webzine's inaugural issue last month has stripped it from its site.'