While fighting al-Shabaab in 2011, Kenyan army officer Major Emmanuel Chirchir noticed that the Somali-based Islamist group was using donkeys to transport weapons. He dispatched a message via Twitter, warning the local Kenyan population: “Any large concentration and movement of loaded donkeys will be considered as al-Shabaab activity.”
Al-Shabaab cyber-punched back, mocking Chirchir for threatening to bomb donkeys: “Your eccentric battle has got animal rights groups quite concerned, Major.” In his new book Messing With the Enemy, Clint Watts, a former FBI agent, describes this exchange as the first “international-terrorist-versus-counter-terrorist Twitter battle”.
On one level, this long-forgotten exchange might seem trivial. In recent years, there has been a deluge of grisly news about Islamist extremist campaigns. And more sophisticated cyber tactics have, according to the FBI, been used by Russian intelligence to undermine both US and European elections. Earlier this month, Robert Mueller’s investigation unveiled indictments against a dozen Russian agents for using social media to discredit Hillary Clinton during the 2016 US election campaign.