According to this article from CNN (Hat tip: Women against Sharia blog), al-Shabaab is using western style hip-hop in a recruitment film— a strategy believed to have been master-minded by the American-Somali we told you about here. It is not clear to me if this is another video or whether CNN is just a month late in catching on to the story. Nonetheless, here it is.
Intelligence experts say the video was probably made in recent weeks and comes on the heels of an audio message in March purportedly from Osama bin Laden. In that recording, the al Qaeda leader calls on his “Muslim brothers in Mujahid Somalia” to overthrow President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed for cooperating with the West.
Al-Shabaab is the militant Islamic wing in Somalia. It means “Youth” in Arabic.
“We’re seeing perhaps their most sophisticated attempt so far to really reach an audience of potential recruits in America, and that’s one of the things that made that video very significant,” said Ben Venzke of the IntelCenter, a Washington-based research group that tracks al Qaeda’s development and messages.
“They’re casting it in a way that’s going to speak to the youth of today,” Venzke said. “Most of the time, what we’re seeing in their videos directly parallels what the groups are doing operationally, what they are targeting, where they’re recruiting.”
It has been quiet for sometime now on the Somali missing youth story that we have followed since last November, but this CNN report has added a bit more new information in addition to the old news about the recruitment film.
Sheik Ahmed Matan knows that (that recruiters are speaking to today’s youth) firsthand. A respected member of Britain’s Somali community, Matan said he knows of hundreds of young Somali men who have returned to Somalia for terrorist training.
“A lot of young people from here, from America, from Canada, from everywhere from Europe — they went there,” he said.
He added that these men are capable of being sent back home to conduct terrorist operations, even suicide bombings.
“It can be, they can train anytime and send them here, anytime,” Matan said.
Hundreds! That is the first time we have heard that hundreds of former refugee youths have returned to Somalia for terrorist training. Matan goes on to say that mosques in Great Britain must be monitored to root out recruitment activity—FAT CHANCE! British authorities are the biggest chickens in dealing with Islam on any level.