Boston Marathon bombs: al-Qaeda's Inspire magazine taught pressure cooker bomb-making techniques

MTV Lebanon

27-06-2025

A recipe for how to make pressure cooker bombs, which investigators say were used in the Boston Marathon attack, was most notoriously published in the al-Qaeda magazine Inspire.
The recipe – along with a rationale for post-9/11 terror – was printed three years ago in al-Qaeda's English-language promotional online magazine, Inspire.
In an article, it instructed readers on how, as its headline writers put it, to 'Make a bomb in the kitchen of your Mom'.
It gave the types of explosive, timers and other ingredients needed – along with, it said, a pressure cooker.
That article was from the first edition of the magazine. Written in perfect but slightly hysterical English, some thought it was a hoax or satire along the lines of the film 'Four Lions'.
In fact, most analysts remain convinced it was the brainchild of Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-American propagandist for Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and was edited by Samir Khan, another American citizen who had travelled to Yemen to join the group.
It was clear in its market – the disaffected young men in their mid-twenties, whether converts or of Muslim origin, who studies show are by far and away the biggest source of recruits to the jihadist cause.
Subsequent editions suggested even more random forms of violence that anyone could carry out, such as driving a car into crowds as a weapon. The aim was to cause maximum response with a minimum of fuss.
Its methodology was in some ways a sign of weakness, an acknowledgement that well-planned, large scale attacks on the scale of 9/11, or for that matter the Oklahoma outrage by a white supremacist, were unlikely to be repeated because of increased security and the erosion of al-Qaeda's command structure by drone strikes.
Other 'spectaculars' had failed, such as the attempt to down an airliner over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009 by the so-called 'underpants bomber', an Awlaki recruit of Nigerian origin, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.
By contrast, smaller scale random attacks had notable success: most strikingly, before Inspire's first edition but clearly an incident its authors had in mind, Nidal Malik Hasan, the US army major who shot 13 people dead at his base at Fort Hood, Texas, had been in direct contact with Awlaki.
As new editions appeared, investigators took Inspire ever more seriously.
A disaffected US army private, Naser Jason Abdo, jailed for life in August 2012 after being found in possession of a bomb with which he said he was going to blow up a restaurant popular with soldiers from Fort Hood in an act of solidarity with Hasan, had a copy of the Inspire article.
In his hotel room were all the ingredients listed, including two pressure cookers.
Last October, Quasi Muhammad Nafis, accused of attempting to bomb a Federal Reserve Bank building in New York, was said by prosecutors to have read Inspire and even to have written an article in the hope that the magazine would publish it.
He, though, was trapped by an FBI sting operation. His car bomb was a fake given him by an undercover operative.
Awalaki and Khan were both killed in an American drone strike in Yemen in September 2011. The magazine has continued to publish, however, and while the pressure cookers do not prove Islamist terrorists were involved in the Boston attack, that is only part of the story.
For all its semi-comic tone, the magazine's strategy of balancing relatively small-scale bombing with dramatic symbolism for political effect is an important chapter in the modern terror playbook. And its recipes are available for anyone.