Al Shabaab Joins Twitter

... and their social media maven is surprisingly lucid, boasts a good vocabulary, and holds a virulent hatred for enemy forces.

Earlier this year, the Taliban joined Twitter to help spread its insurgent message in English, Pashto, and Arabic. And now, Al Shabaab, the Somali Islamist paramilitary group, has sent out its first tweets this week under the handle @HSMPress (Harakat Al-Shabaab Al Mujahideen Press Office). Unlike the heavily propagandistic Taliban account, however, Al Shabaab has struck a (slightly) more nuanced tone in its tweets, with missives urging journalists to double-check their sources and explaining to families of Al Shabaab soldiers how they can find out whether their sons have been killed in battle. Al Shabaab is dedicated to seizing control of all of Somalia and placing the beleaguered country under Islamist rule. In recent months, Kenyan, Ugandan, and Ethiopian forces have entered Somalia with the intent of crushing the insurgency, as Al Shabaab has carried out deadly attacks in those countries in the past two years.