Members of the Taliban have set up a Twitter account, according to the Guardian.
The feed, @AlemarahWeb, tweets mostly in Pashto, a regional dialect of Afghanistan, though a few posts are written in English.
"11 US-NATO invaders killed, 11 wounded in clash amid ‘Operation Badar': PAKITA, May 12," a recent English-language tweet reads.
Nearly all these posts link to headlines on alemarah-iea.net, the website for the so-called Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.
The Guardian writes that the headlines are "highly exaggerated" at times, but that the Taliban's embrace of social media--and other technologies--may help the group deliver communications quickly and broadly, especially when the group's website goes down, as it frequently does.
From the Guardian:
The Taliban's embrace of social media is just one part of an impressive public relations capability that runs rings around the efforts of Nato to communicate with Afghans. [...] The movement puts out a constant stream of information through text messages and email. Edited video clips of fights against coalition forces, "martyrdom operations" and Taliban songs are circulated through Bluetooth-enabled smartphones.
@AlemarahWeb has been active since 2010. On the afternoon of April 12, the account had 108 followers, down from 224 several hours earlier.