New Delhi Times
Monday June 15, 2020
The Al-Katiba Media foundation, the external media department of the extremist outfit Al-Shabaab, has been releasing in parts a film series titled “And Be Harsh Against Them”. The ongoing film series has been depicting the attacks carried by Al-Shabaab on the Federal Government of Somalia (FGS) and the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) bases.
The eighth instalment of the film was released on May 23, 2020. This instalment depicts the attack on the El-Salin military base followed by an infantry attack on September 22, 2019, which killed at least 20 Somali government soldiers and wounded 18 others.
Al-Shabaab militants detonated a suicide car bomb at the El-Salin military base followed by an infantry attack and had also briefly taken over the base. Mowlid Ahmed Hassan, a Spokesperson for the Somali Special Forces said that the militants attacked the base “in large numbers”. Somali troops seized the El-Salin base from Al-Shabab on August 6, 2019. It was one of four bases in Lower Shabelle region recaptured following an offensive by the Somali military. This area is economically important to Al- Shabaab and they are willing to fight to get it back.
The video depicting this attack has now been released with Arabic subtitles. The duration of the video is 18 minutes. In the introductory part, the video focuses on 26-year-old Abshir Yusuf Ali (alias Saladin), the militant who drove and detonated the SVBIED during the El-Salin base attack in September. He speaks against the attacks by the Crusaders and Jews against Somalia and says that Somalis who fight against such forces are elevated to the status of martyrs. Ali claims that his actions are part of a Jihad and extols the El-Salin base attack by Al-Shabab as a means of punishing the infidel (Kafir). Ali calls the AMISON peacekeepers as well as the Somali armed forces personnel as apostates who deserve to be killed.
The video then shows actual footage of the September 23 attack. Al-Shabaab militants carrying automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) can be seen launching an offensive and entering the air base. The footage shows the executions of a captured soldier who has been labelled in the video as an apostate. Later, the video shows Al-Shabaab militants searching the base and collecting weapons, boxes of ammunition, and military equipment before setting fire to some of this materiel.
In the concluding section, the video features a martyr Al-Shabaab member, Hassan Abshir Jibril (alias Walalu), who was killed in an airstrike by Somali Military backed by the African Union forces on September 29, 2019. This section glorifies Jibril as a martyr committed to a greater cause who devoted his entire life to jihad and propagation (dawa).
The release of this eighth instalment glorifying the activities by Al-Shabaab is significant as it sheds light upon Al-Shabaab’s growing military capabilities and its ability to execute a terror attack on guarded military defence bases as well as successfully executing mass-casualty attacks in the heart of Somali cities, including the federal capital, Mogadishu.
This newly released video is also a manifestation of the fact that Al-Shabaab runs coordinated media operations that is capable of regularly producing propaganda material and disseminate the ideology of the terrorist groups. The inclusion of previously unreleased archival footage also shows that the Al-Kataib Media Foundation continues to maintain a sizeable amount of recorded footage and other media materials for later use in Al-Shabaab propaganda releases.