Warning enemy civilians of their impending doom is not a new technique. Medieval knights would shout threats to the people of whatever town their armies had besieged, lobbing a dead cow over the walls to underscore the danger (as recreated admirably in Monty Python and the Holy Grail), while US planes dropped thousands of pamphlets over Iraq before the invasion, warning citizens to get out of the way of the incoming troops.
It's a technique used to indemnify the aggressors, an insurance against possible civilian casualties: "Well, we told them we were coming...".
Kenya has brought this old strategy into the 21st century. Meet Major Emmanuel Chirchir (@MajorEChirchir), spokesman of the Kenyan military and now something of a Twitter legend for his tweets about the progress of the Kenyan incursion into Somalia, getting himself nearly 5 000 followers after just a couple of weeks on the social network.
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