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Recipes for terror: An Islamic State computer reveals the making and training of a terrorist

Recipes for terror: An Islamic State computer reveals the making and training of a terrorist

ANTAKYA, Turkey -- The black Dell laptop found in an Islamic State safe house inside Syria not only contains instructions for how to weaponize the bubonic plague, it also includes thousands of files that provide a window into how would-be jihadists become radicalized and learn to carry out their deadly craft.

The laptop of Muhammad S., a Tunisian chemistry and physics student who joined the Islamic State, contains a mix of speeches by jihadi leaders, neo-Nazi screeds and U.S. Army manuals on warfare. It also contains glimpses of the 24-year-old jihadist’s former life, showing that he once had a weakness for the music of Celine Dion and a desire to find a good recipe for banana mousse.

The files from the laptop reveal that, once committed to jihad, Muhammad left Celine Dion behind and became more focused on how to poison people. One 21-minute clip, featuring former American Nazi Party member Kurt Saxon, offers instructions for how to obtain the deadly toxin ricin from castor beans. Mr. Saxon provides a detailed description of the process, producing the ricin on camera. “Now you really have some lethal stuff here!” he exclaims.

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This is just one example from the massive amount of data discovered on Muhammad’s laptop. The computer contains 146 gigabytes of material and 35,347 files.

The vast majority of the files were downloaded from the Internet and contain practical or ideological instructions for waging jihad. A small percentage were produced by Muhammad himself. These include scanned copies of his university exams and pictures of him and his family attending a wedding of a female family member.

The laptop makes clear that its owner has one huge passion: destruction.

The folders are meticulously organized: In one marked “explosives” and a sub-folder marked “terrorist,” which itself was in a sub-folder marked “Jihadi,” Muhammad had gathered 206 documents. They include publications by Western authors for commercial sale, such as “How to Make Semtex,” “Chemistry and Technology of Explosives” and “CIA Improvised Sabotage Devices.”

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Muhammad appears to have consumed material from extremists of all stripes, downloading “The Terrorist’s Handbook,” “The Anarchist Cookbook,” and a neo-Nazi e-book called “The White Resistance Manual.” He wasn’t even averse to turning to the hated American military for practical instruction: In one folder, he collected 51 U.S. Army publications available online, such as “Sniper Training: U.S. Field Manual” and “U.S. Army — Psychological Operations Process Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures.”

Muhammad also got his hands on two obscure English-language jihadi publications, “The Mujahideen Explosives Handbook” and “The Mujahideen Poisons Handbook.” In the preface to the latter work, author Abdul Aziz dedicates his publication to the jihadists in Afghanistan “who lit the flame of jihad in the hearts of every sincere Muslim throughout the world.”

Aziz warns his audience to be cautious while preparing deadly toxins. “It is much, much more dangerous than preparing explosives!” he writes. “I know several [jihadists] whose bodies are finished due to poor protection etc. On the positive side, you can be confident that the poisons have actually been tried and tested (successfully, he he!).”

The laptop contains extensive research on jihadi terrorist attacks. One file includes videos of the July 7, 2005, attacks in London and the 9/​11 attacks. A 206-page document contains extensive jihadi analyses of al-Qaida’s deadly strikes in Bali, Madrid, London and the failed 2001 shoe bombing on a flight bound for Miami, Florida.

Muhammad appears to have been a voracious consumer of speeches by jihadi ideologues. Most popular is Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-American religious leader linked to al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, who was killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2011. There are also speeches by al-Qaida founder Osama bin Laden and current al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Muhammad compiled speeches by 112 other jihadi leaders. They include Juhayman al-Otaybi, who led the attack on the Kaaba in Mecca in 1979; Sayyid Qutb, an important ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood; and Abdullah al-Nafisi, a Kuwaiti professor who has called for massive anthrax attacks in the United States.

A series of documents include tips on how to travel from one jihadi hot spot to another without attracting attention, how to dress and how to fake passports. One preoccupation is the danger of using cellphones, which one paper describes as the equivalent of “carrying a moving spy with you.”

Not all files on the laptop are recipes for jihad, war, killings, explosions or poisonings. Some show that Muhammad once lived a far more normal life.

The laptop includes pictures of Muhammad in 2009 and 2010 dressed in Western clothes and without a beard while attending a wedding in Tunisia, playing soccer and joking with his friends. There are recipes for baking a cake, making banana mousse and preparing caramel. He even kept some screen shots of a music playlist from 2010, which included the songs of Celine Dion and Shaggy’s “Hey Sexy Lady.”

Muhammad appears to have changed radically around 2011. After that date, the only songs he added are anasheed — arrhythmic, a cappella Islamic music.

The laptop also contains evidence that Muhammad’s family and the Tunisian government were aware of his radical turn. A handwritten statement dated April 22, 2013, was found on the laptop, signed by Muhammad’s father and stamped by the Tunisian Interior Ministry. It suggests he already knew his son had been seduced by the path of destruction. It reads: “I am committed on behalf of my son Muhammad S. to pay the price of any damages he causes, wherever he is.”

Harald Doornbos is a journalist based in Islamabad, Pakistan. Jenan Moussa is a roving reporter for Dubai-based Al-Aan TV. They wrote this for Foreign Policy.

First Published: September 12, 2014, 4:00 a.m.

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