Magharebia

» see magharebia.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Magharebia covered the five countries of the Maghreb: Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia. It ran regional news alongside sports and lifestyle sections, with message boards underneath for readers, and it published every story in three languages. The bare domain served the Arabic edition, under the title مغاربية. By the standards of a regional news site it was a reasonable operation, and roughly 6,500 people a day read about 10,000 articles on it.

It was also a product of the United States military. European Command launched it in 2004, and when Africa Command was stood up in 2007 the site transferred across. General Dynamics held the operating contract and took a $6.9 million extension in 2014, followed by $1.86 million for the wrap-up. The money came through something called the Trans Regional Web Initiative, run out of Special Operations Command, which owned a small family of similar sites aimed at the Horn of Africa, Iraq, the Gulf and Central Asia.

Congress lost patience with the program before the audience did. Committee language recorded members as "skeptical of the effectiveness of the websites established under the TRWI," and Section 344 of the fiscal 2014 defense authorization act ordered it shut. Magharebia and its sister site Sabahionline went offline on or around 10 February 2015. The archive brackets it neatly: the last full homepage capture is 6 February 2015 at about 12 KB, and every crawl after that returns a stub of a few hundred bytes.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ who was paying ~

The site disclosed its sponsor. That is the detail people tend to get wrong about it, assuming a covert operation where there was a footer. AFRICOM's spokesman Benjamin Benson described the sites as information tools meant to counter extremist material, and offered a line that reads as unusually modest for the genre: "The Internet is a big place, and we are one of many websites out there."

Turkey has its own long argument about where the state ends and the newsroom begins, so the shape of this was legible to me even though the site itself was not. The Maghreb is francophone North Africa and reads its news in Arabic and French. Nothing routed it through Ankara, and in eleven years I never once landed on the thing.

~ no farewell post ~

There was no farewell post. Nextgov reported the closure on 13 February 2015, three days after the fact, by which point both sites were simply not answering. The related properties covering Iraq and the Gulf stayed up for a while longer, funded through Central Command rather than AFRICOM, so one line in an appropriations bill took down part of the family and left the rest running. Eleven years of regional reporting came down at once, and a reader in Tunis who had bookmarked it got no explanation at all. The decision that ended it was taken in a committee room on another continent, by people who had concluded the site did not work.

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