Recently reports have surfaced of a document circulating on "a password-protected al-Qaeda-affiliated forum" regarding targets considered by al-Qaida to have strategic value. See, for example "Targets for Jihad Operation Focus upon Oil Pipelines, Refineries, and Pumping Stations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Within the United States" by the SITE Institute.
Pipeline map linked to by al-Qaida document
This document has an interesting history. The most recent version was released in response to al-Zawahiri's recent call for attacks against just such strategic targets. Bubba got his copy from the al-Saf forum, but it is probably available elsewhere (e.g. al-Hesbah):
202.71.102.108/~alsafnat/vb/showthread.php?t=19468
The earliest known version of this document is dated 05-02-2003 and persists in a Google cache of a the Tajdeed forum of Mohammed al-Massari:
http://tinyurl.com/dob9k
Another version of the document was translated by machine and posted at www.homelandsecurityus.net. That page is also gone but you will find a cached version of it here...
TransAlaska Pipeline Facts
Yet another - and possibly the definitive - version of this discussion began life as a thread on the Islah forum of Sa'ad al-Faqih dated 2003-06-05, which was subsequently saved to an HTML file called o.i.l.htm, linked to from a now deceased Geocities site calls 'sysa911' and hosted on another deceased Geocities site, 'eqra9111'. sysa911 linked to another document titled "World Oil Transit Chokepoints", a US Department of Energy study from 2002.
Sources well-placed in the oil and chemical industries are quite confident that there are much worse things jihadis could try and do than attack oil pipelines, so if this is what al-Qaida wants to focus on attacking, lucky are we.
Archives of al-Saf, Tajdeed and homelandsecurityus.net pages .zip 356 KB
Archives of the o.i.l.htm and related pages .zip 1.1 MB
Posted on 04 January 2006 @ 12:52