Somalia's al-Shabab emulates the Taliban
The group has adopted many of the Afghan militants' tactics. Both are linked to al-Qaeda.
MOGADISHU, Somalia - Men are forced to grow beards. Women can't leave home without a male relative. Music, movies, and watching sports on TV are banned. Limbs are chopped off as punishment, and executions by stoning have become a public spectacle.
Somalia is looking more and more like Afghanistan under the Taliban - two rugged countries 2,000 miles apart, each lacking a central government, each with a hard-line Islamist militia that cows the public into submission.
Al-Shabab in Somalia and the Taliban in Afghanistan - their tactics are increasingly similar. Those tactics worked for the Taliban until the U.S. invasion overthrew it in 2001, and now it is making a comeback. Meanwhile, al-Shabab has gained control over large swaths of this arid Horn of Africa country.
In the latest adoption of tactics long used by the Afghan militants, al-Shabab is ordering households in southern Somalia to contribute a boy to the militants' ranks. Childless families have to pay al-Shabab $50 a month. That is Somalia's per-capita income.
An al-Shabab commander attributed the shared tactics and ideology to both groups' following a strict form of Islam.
"One more thing we deeply share is the hatred of infidels," the commander, Abu Dayib, told the Associated Press.
Some experts say the similarities are no accident.
"Al-Shabab is copying exactly whatever the Taliban was doing in the late 1990s, because they think the strategies the Taliban employed in Afghanistan were successful," said Vahid Mujdeh, the Afghan author of a book on the Taliban. "There is no doubt that the Taliban are like heroes for al-Shabab."
U.S. and other security officials worry about another common thread: Both have links to al-Qaeda.
Last month al-Shabab claimed its first international attack - twin bombings in Uganda that killed 76 people watching the World Cup final on TV. Uganda said at least one of the confessed participants belonged to al-Qaeda. Simultaneous attacks are an al-Qaeda hallmark.
Both the Taliban and al-Shabab moved into a power vacuum left by civil war and were initially welcomed by publics desperate for law and order. What they got was an extremely harsh penal code.
Now the Taliban is gaining ground despite NATO forces' efforts to push it back and brazenly advertised its clout this month by stoning to death, in front of a crowd, a young couple accused of committing adultery.
In Somalia, two months ago, al-Shabab accused Ahmed Ali Shuke, a 27-year-old laborer, of being a government spy and slashed his tongue.