By: Ava Conolly BMC ’26
On September 21st, 2013, four Al-Shabaab gunmen charged into Westgate Mall in Nairobi Kenya resulting in a multiple day siege of the mall and 71 deaths and 200 injuries. The attack came in response to Kenyan military involvement in Somalia against the groups reign. On the day of the attack, confusion spread about the attack in Nairobi, with some believing it had been a robbery gone wrong.
My family moved away from Nairobi two months prior. In our four years living there, I had probably gone to Westgate mall a hundred times. During the attack, I remember my parents pacing around our living room, trying to get any information they could after finding out a friend and her baby were at the mall (we found out later they survived.) Trying to know what was happening was impossible, and twitter was the main place they turned to access emerging information, even though it was less credible.
The lack of clarity as the siege was underway created chaos for anyone trying to gain an understanding of what was going on, especially for those with loved ones known to be at the mall that day. It was only when an Al-Shabaab affiliated twitter account took responsibility for the attack that Nairobi citizens, government, and the media understood that they were in fact dealing with a terrorist attack.
The Westgate attack was the first time a terrorist group had used twitter to report an attack, using the site throughout the duration of the siege. Seeing as most people in Nairobi were unaware of the attack prior to the tweets, it played a heavily central role in the attack. Sites like twitter provide a unique freedom to jihadi groups as they don’t have to the risk of censorship in traditional media coverage. Although it’s common to believe groups like Al-Shabaab would use social media primarily for recruitment or propaganda, the use of twitter in this attack builds off of a different technique, shaping the narrative.
During the attack, Al-Shabaab affiliated accounts tweeted 556 times, 88.3% of them being publicity and propaganda and less than 2% being recruitment and radicalization, aligning with the theory Lynch noted of Al-Qaeda.
More recently, a study was conducted on Al-Shabaab’s behavior between January and December of 2023, showcasing strong coordination between various Al-Shabaab affiliated accounts on various social media sights. On September 27th, for example, a three-minute video was shared on Telegram of an Al-Shabaab attack in Nuur Dugle, Somalia, and within the minute 13 other accounts on the site shared the same video, showing a strategic element of the use of social media. Furthermore, the group has provided detailed instructions for creating new accounts after August 2023 crackdowns on terrorist affiliated accounts on Telegram, proving the importance of these social media accounts to current Al-Shabaab strategies.
While the 2013 attack on Westgate launched a new frontier of the use of social media in claiming responsibilities for attacks, the phenomenon is part of a larger narrative-based approach Al-Shabaab highlights in their strategy.
Sources
Mair, D. (2016). #Westgate: A Case Study: How al-Shabaab used Twitter during an Ongoing Attack. Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 40(1), 24–43. https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2016.1157404
Gilroy, Georgia. “The Online Frontline: Decoding al-Shabaab’s Social Media Strategy.” CTC Sentinel 17, no. 1 (January 2024). Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. https://ctc.westpoint.edu/the-online-frontline-decoding-al-shabaabs-social-media-strategy/.
Ken Menkhaus, “Al-Shabaab and Social Media: A Double-Edged Sword” (2014)
