just been shot in neck by shabab assassin. not critical yet

— abu m (@abumamerican) April 25, 2013

Terrorism expert J.M. Berger reflects on the death of 28-year-old American jihadist Omar Hammami, who once live-tweeted an attempt on his life. Berger forged a mutual respect with Hammami, who was based in Somalia and eventually murdered by al-Shabab as a heretical foreign fighter:

I wanted to know more about why al-Shabab was trying to kill him, but I didn’t want to promote his clearly pro-al Qaeda Twitter account by engaging with him in front of the world. So I sent him a direct message (DM) using Twitter’s system for private communication and asked him to email me. His reply was the start of something — exactly what wasn’t clear at the time, and to some extent, still isn’t. Omar – and it was Omar, although he would not admit it for endless months – was suspicious at first. “You are too far on the dark side, buddy” was the subject line of his first email. …

Our conversations turned more ideological, pushing and pulling over terrorism and the intentional targeting of civilians, the significance of the Arab Spring, and Omar’s belief that the United States was oppressing Muslims around the world. We sparred over whether America had a national security interest in the establishment of an Islamic caliphate, one of his pet obsessions. He argued that the United States feared the caliphate; I argued that we wouldn’t much care as long as terrorism wasn’t the method for its establishment. Just when the conversation would start to get interesting, he would pull back. …

My complicated feelings about our relationship had been on a slow boil for some time. I continued to try to convince him to give himself up to U.S. authorities. He didn’t want to spend life in prison, he said. I told him he might be able to get a better deal than that, but he wasn’t interested. At one point, he said the only way he would come back to the United States was “in a body bag.”