Twitter combat, al-Shabaab, black banners, Tahrir and more
[ by Charles Cameron — first Twitter as combat zone, then black banners again, Somalia, Mahdism, Babism, AQ, Iraq, Libya, Egypt ]
Just for the record.
You probably already knew ISAF has been tweeting back at the Islamic Emirate, and you can follow both at @ABalkhi and @ISAFmedia…
Well, @HSMPress just joined the fray — that’s al-Shabaab:
Notice the flag?
It’s that black banner again.
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There has been some controversy over whether or not there was an element of support for AQ in Libya, and at the recent Tahrir Square demonstrations, and black banners have featured heavily in the discussions.
Let’s get our black banners straight. First, Libya.
This was the black flag allegedly flown in Libya after the ouster of Col. Gadhafi. It was published as illustrated here by the Daily Telegraph, under the headline “Libya: Al Qaeda flag flown above Benghazi courthouse” and with the commentary ” The black flag of Al Qaeda has been spotted flying over a public building in Libya, raising concerns that the country could lurch towards Muslim extremism.”
Note the resemblance to the logo al-Shabaab is using.
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Juan Cole pooh-poohed the idea that this was an AQ flag, calling it a “silly urban legend going around” and quoting a Libyan scholar-friend on the point:
I looked up the mentioned flag, it appears to be a black flag with the shahada [Muslim profession of faith] in it. A black flag goes back all the way to the prophet, and the addition of the shahada makes it a Jihadist flag. There have been Jihadists in Libya from day one, and they fought against Qaddafi. But is Al-Qaeda, as in the global network taking over? No.
Cole’s friend’s comments are worth reading in full: they provide context on the various factions and their relative strengths, and Cole sums it all up in terms of the specific issue of AQ and Benghazi thus:
What this informed observer is saying is that a miniscule group of jihadists put up that flag, in the chaos of the post-revolutionary period, but that they are highly unrepresentative of politics in Benghazi.
Fair enough. But that wasn’t just a black flag with the Shahada, was it?
When Cole’s friend rites “A black flag goes back all the way to the prophet, and the addition of the shahada makes it a Jihadist flag,” Cole comments “Moreover, the black flag as a symbol is not a monopoly of al-Qaeda. Revolutionaries raised a black flag in the medieval Abbasid Revolution of 750 AD.”
Indeed. They may also have produced the ahadith about the army with black banners from Khorasan, which give such flags a distinctively Mahdist application – ahadith which Ali Soufan tells us have been used extensively in AQ recruitment.
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