“We didn’t know which piece was which.”“The way he was killed was unbelievable,” he said, shaking with grief. Fact-finding in war occurred before the age of smartphones, of course, but in Somalia, old-school methods fell flat, too. A trip to Shabab territory is an open invitation to be kidnapped, so I could not survey battlefields or dig through craters for scraps of bombs. Anytime we used words like “Al Shabab,” “bomb” and “drone,” they would have immediately been flagged by the algorithm in American surveillance devices. So we invited them to Mogadishu, asking them to travel along I.E.D.-infested roads and risk being accused by Shabab of being informants.

Source: International New York Times April 27, 2019 16:07 UTC