November 27, 2007 9:55:00 AM
Wired
MOGADISHU, Somalia - Thanks to the Web and other technologies, the homegrown guerrillas here are starting toact like insurgents in Iraq. Cue the improvised bombs, makeshift rocket-launchers, and text-message death threats.
These days, you can’t fight a war in isolation – not with websites, satellite phones, global shipping, 24-hour cable news and instant bank transfers. Anyone with a shared ideology, or a shared foe, can band together even if thousands of miles apart, using the same tactics to strike at the interests of the same global power. Thinkers like John Robb call this "Open Source Warfare."
Ironically, it’s for that reason that the U.S. gave the Ethiopia government the boost it needed to sweep south and destroy the Islamic Courts in Somalia. The Defense Department suspected the Courts of being friendly to Al Qaeda. But not because there were legions of extremists already running drills in the country. The suspected Al Qaeda tie, if it was indeed legit, was in all likelihood tiny. “You Americans,” one Somali professor scolded me the other day, “you’ll destroy an entire city to get three people.”
But the invasion didn't actually calm things down here. Instead, there's been more fighting -- and tactics that come straight of the jihadist playbook. Recently, there have been suicide bombings and improvised explosives – both new to Mogadishu. And these mysterious weapons, confiscated by African Union peacekeepers. Best I can tell, they’re Hezbollah-style Katyusha Qassam rockets, a relative rarity in this corner of the world, if my reading is correct. It’s a worrying omen for a country that’s already had its share of problems.
As in Iraq, a pre-emptive war targeting potential terrorists has backfired. Thanks to the U.S. intervention, Somali fighters now have common cause with extremists in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and elsewhere. Don’t believe me? A couple days ago a Somali journalist showed me an anonymous text-message death threat he’d received, apparently from the nationalist insurgent group Al Shabab.
It was signed “Al Shabab = mujahideen.” The local guerrillas had morphed into international jihadists.
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