By John Ikani
Weeks after warning media against publishing Al-Shabab propaganda, Somalia government has launched a new TV channel named Daljir to counter all kinds of coverage relating to the terrorist ideology and acts of intimidation by the Jihadist group.
The move also comes weeks after Somali government banned the use of the name Al Shabaab – which means “the youth” in Arabic – and asked the public to refer to the terrorist group, which has ties to Al Qaeda, as ‘Khawarij’, a word meaning “deviant sect”.
The state media reported that President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud inaugurated the SNTV Daljir (Somali National TV Daljir) channel – which “will focus on anti-Khawarij (al-Shabab) operations”.
Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen, more commonly known as al-Shabaab, is an Islamic fundamentalist Salafi jihadist group which is based in Somalia and active elsewhere in East Africa.
Al-Shabab has a sophisticated media machinery that includes several affiliated media outlets and dozens of accounts across social media platforms.
The establishment of the TV channel is in line with President Mohamud’s pledge to defeat the armed group that is believed to enjoy the backing of al-Qaeda.
With brazen terrorist attacks at home and abroad, the Somalia-based Islamist insurgent group has proved resilient despite strategic setbacks in recent years.
In August, al-Shabab fighters unleashed a gun-and-bomb assault in a deadly 30-hour siege of a hotel that killed 21 people.
The armed group was driven out of Mogadishu by African Union forces in 2011. However, it still controls swaths of the countryside.
The deadliest attack occurred in October 2017 when a truck packed with explosives blew up in Mogadishu, killing 512 people.
