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Al Shabaab fighters parade on the beach somewhere south of Mogadishu. This photo was taken last month. These fighters, in their headscarves, guns and matching uniforms, are children.

http://zed-books.blogspot.com/2011/12/interview-with-mary-harper.html

"For the past two decades, books on Somalia have tended to mirror some of the attitudes about the country itself. They have been either analyses by a small and highly specialised field of policy analysts and academics, or written from and for the perspective that caters to the most common cliches and impressions about this most failed of failed states; a nation of warlords, pirates, jihadists and refugees fleeing in unseaworthy boats often only to drown. All of these are of course part of the narrative of Somalia's inability to break from its repeated cycles of the failure of domestic politics and outside intervention over the past 25 years, but what Mary Harper has done is to explain this narrative as a whole - rather than a series of snapshots. This is a book which is clear, accessible and thorough. It has done what books on Somalia rarely do, which is to examine the multitude of failures, misunderstandings, and wilful acts of destruction that have caused Somalia's downf...

Here is my report for the BBC on Al Shabaab's latest experiment with the power of the internet: (With the fiercest fighting for months in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, and Kenyan troops deployed deep into southern Somali territory, the country is experiencing a particularly heavy period of violence. On one side is the Islamist group Al Shabaab, which controls much of southern and central Somalia. On the other, transitional government troops, African Union peacekeepers, and Kenyan and Ethiopian soldiers. Fighting is not only taking place on the ground. As Mary Harper reports, it’s also going on in cyberspace:) At exactly five thirty-five on Wednesday evening, an email dropped into my inbox. It was from the Al Shabaab press office and it invited me to follow Al Shabaab on Twitter. I did so instantly, and there, with its distinctive white logo on a black background, was an image of the Al Shabaab flag. The first tweet was in Arabic, b-ismi-llāhi r-ra ḥ māni r-ra ḥ īmi , which transl...

'Somalia is one of the most neglected and misunderstood casualties of the war on terror. If you want to understand more, this is your book: succinct, perceptive, judicious, it traces a compelling narrative which brings vividly to life an extraordinary country and its turbulent history. Its scope is wide, ensuring that there are many questions here relevant to places far beyond Somalia: issues of how a people and culture adapt to the challenges of globalisation with ingenuity, as well as how they suffer from its impact; of how Western interventions pursue their own agenda. This was a book which urgently needed writing.'