Radio War Nerd EP #158 — Inside Al-Shabaab

Good episode! Always like Somalia content, there are way too many misconceptions of the situation and history of that country out there. It would be cool to do a Mohammed Abdullah Hassan and the Dervish rebellions episode some day…. Also, Somalia had some pretty great music in the 70s and 80s: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZW-Mht7TuR8" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZW-Mht7TuR8</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgIOdlJliKU." rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgIOdlJliKU.</a> The whole Sweet as Broken Dates comp is a great starting point. Regarding what John said about recognizing differences between ethnic groups in Bosnia. What his friend said is definitely true when differentiating between people *from* Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia, but *within* Bosnia, everyone speaks more or less the same. For example, someone from Sarajevo has a Sarajevo accent regardless of their ethnicity. This has slightly changed post-war with the introduction of standardized varieties of Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian in school curriculums in Bosnia. I was reminded of a scene from a Serbian comedy film that is set in 1991. In the film, a truck driver is driving through Bosnia and runs into a makeshift roadblock from some local villagers. At one point the militia men confront the driver and ask him: “Well, whose side are you on?” -“Our side” the driver replies “But, who are we?” -“I dunno, man, it’s all the same shit (in serbo-croatian it’s dick) to me” “We may be the same my friend, but our dicks are not, drop your pants!” He was of course referring to the fact that Muslims are generally circumcised while Christians aren’t. So it can be pretty tough to tell the difference!

Good episode, as a Somali speaker I’d add that there are different dialects and that’s one way to sort of tell what area/tribe someone’s from. And I may have missed it but I don’t remember hearing anything about Qatar funding al shabaab.

Excellent interview and really important topic. One of those things that I always hear about and thought I vaguely understood but really didn’t know shit about.

Where is the RSS feed ?

Literally became a patron for this ep.... very hard to find information on Somalia

Great interview, first time interviewing 2 at once and it worked well. Maybe you can one day have one or both on to talk on depth about the Ogden war. I know John wrote an article on it, or maybe it only talked about it briefly. But we never hear much about African wars (well more here then anywhere else anyway), it seemed like a big conventional war, and has blowback today. Plus t-34's in heavy use 40 years after ww2 that's cool enough