A few months after Major Chirchir took to twitter to update us on the current state of war in Somalia https://twitter.com/#!/MajorEChirchir , Al Shabaab has done the same. Yes, Al Shabaab has joined twitter under the name Harakat al-Shabaab Mujahedeen(HSM) https://twitter.com/HSMpress. As the time of writing this the account has 827 followers, listed by 10 people and 22 tweets.
And the account has propaganda 101, promising to publish the details of some of the dead soldiers, including their names, ids and ranks. I realized that all the 22 tweets are in English language meaning the twitter account communication is aimed at someone else (Kenya) and not Somalis. Al Shabaab account might as well be a fake account being operated probably from Kenya but at the moment it seems the war has now moved to twitter. I also realized that most of the followers are either Kenyans or journalists from different parts of the World…with that Al Shabaab might have just got the right channels to feed with Propaganda.
Kwani when soldiers die their bodies are not carried back? How does Al Shabaab obtain ID card numbers, names and ranks? We’ll see. My guess is it’s just propaganda, nothing else.
But the truth on the ground is not Major E. Chirchir’s rosy tweets!
Kenyan IDs? I don’t think our soldiers retain their IDs after recruitment! Anyway, it might be different IDs let me wait till Monday!
Soldier’s details are embedded on dog tags, so they could have a point