Kenyan soldiers and members of an extremist Islamist militant group have been fighting each other in Somalia since Kenya invaded two months ago. Now, their spokesmen are taking the battle onto Twitter, with taunts, accusations and insults being directly traded in a rare engagement on the Internet.
The propaganda war on the microblogging website shows the increasingly sophisticated use of media by both sides and underscores that there is often little reliable information about the conflict in Somalia that now directly or indirectly involves a half-dozen nations, analysts say.
“The tweets themselves will not be entirely accurate but it will allow analysts to triangulate that information and come up with a more accurate picture of what is really happening,” said E.J. Hogendoorn of the International Crisis Group think tank.
On Monday, the Islamic insurgent group al-Shabab used its Twitter feed to accuse Kenya of having a history of committing “barbarous acts” toward ethnic Somalis, and cited a 1984 massacre where human rights groups say Kenyan troops killed around 3,000 Somali men in eastern Kenya.
Al-Shabab’s tweets, written in fluent English, mocked an earlier Twitter posting by Kenya’s army spokesman, Maj. Emmanuel Chirchir, that threatened to bomb concentrations of donkeys that might be moving weapons for the insurgents.
“Your eccentric battle strategy has got animal rights groups quite concerned, Major,” the al-Shabab posting said.
The Associated Press has determined that both Twitter accounts – HSMPress and MajorEChirchir – are legitimate. It’s not clear who is writing the al-Shabab tweets.
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