the victim, who was seen with her children, said she wiped blood on herself and her two kids. mir rack rasly they were able to lay completely still, playing dead for four and a half hours, until help arrived. imagine doing that with a toddler. right now the investigation continues with help from u.s. agencies, and twitter and social media played a role in all of it. joining me to talk more about that, nbc terrorism expert, evan kohlmann. it s good to see you. so we know that terrorists have been using things like twitter to get out information, to brag about their exploits, even as a recruiting tool, but how widespread is it? look, we re in the opening phases of it. these groups used to have their own private communication channels, password protected, separate, for al qaeda members or shabaab members exclusively. but these various different private channels started coming under attack by hackers, by government agencies, et cetera. also these guys started thinking about it and realiz
anti-terrorism efforts and part after peacekeeping force from somalia from the african union. this is a way obviously to get act at them, pure terror, pure and simple. and they won t succeed. reporter: this attack is outside the normal scope of operations by the al qaeda affiliate al-shabaab which claimed responsibility for the attack though it has not been independently confirmed. this group al-shabaab is more known for suicide bombings at the border of somalia. martha. martha: the questions who is involved and where do attackers come from and potentially from the united states. reporter: federal law enforcement sources that the fbi and intelligence community are aggressive drilling down on alleged shabaab members and whether they are american citizens this includes a scrubbing of travel records. the group released on the twitter page a list of alleged attackers. half came from western countries including the u.s., canada and