al-Qeada, rest of Africa [Archive]

buglerbilly

24-07-10, 11:07 AM

Officials say little about raid on terrorist camp in Sahara

By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service

Saturday, July 24, 2010

PARIS -- Mauritanian commandos backed by the French military carried out the raid in the dead of night, guns blazing as they pounced on a small terrorist campsite in a desolate stretch of the Sahara Desert.

The troops killed six members of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Osama bin Laden's loosely organized North African affiliate, but four militants escaped into the surrounding wastelands, Mauritanian Interior Minister Mohamed Ould Boilil said Friday.

Details of the attack, mounted early Thursday near the border of Mali and Mauritania, were tightly held by the governments concerned. But as reports filtered out, it seemed another inconclusive chapter in the little-noticed struggle by several North African nations to snuff out a tiny al-Qaeda-style movement hiding in the Sahara far from the headline-making events of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq.

The French Defense Ministry said Friday that the Mauritanian military carried out the raid "with technical and logistical support" from France, without further defining the support. In Nouakchott, the Mauritanian capital, Ould Boilil said the raid was designed to prevent a planned attack on a military base in Mauritania.

French officials declined to comment on reports that the commandos and the French military had engaged in a joint operation to free a French hostage, Michel Germaneau, a retired engineer who was kidnapped April 22 in neighboring Niger. The terrorist group threatened last week to execute Germaneau if several of its imprisoned members were not released by Monday.

In a video distributed by the group in May, Germaneau complained of poor health and asked French President Nicolas Sarkozy to find a solution to his abduction. Six weeks later, the group published the execution threat.

The Web site of El País, a Madrid newspaper, quoted diplomatic sources as reporting that French special forces were directly involved in the raid. El País said that the unspoken goal was to liberate Germaneau but that he was not at the campsite, contrary to electronic intelligence supplied by the United States. Bernard Valero, a French Foreign Ministry spokesman, declined to confirm or deny the El País report. "From the beginning, we have been fully mobilized to get our fellow citizen liberated," he said.

Operating in small groups believed to total no more than 500 combatants, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb has remained largely in the isolated desert region where Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Algeria come together.

But terrorism specialists said some of its units have raised large amounts of money through ransom and duties imposed on cigarette and drug smugglers passing through the remote desert.

buglerbilly

26-07-10, 04:50 AM

Al-Qaeda says Frenchman killed after failed rescue

July 26, 2010 - 12:24PM

French President Nicolas Sarkozy convened a crisis meeting Monday after an Al-Qaeda affiliate in the Sahara said it had killed a 78-year-old French hostage to avenge a deadly but failed rescue raid.

French authorities said they were trying to verify the claim, made by the head of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) in an audio statement broadcast by Al-Jazeera.

"We announce that we executed the French hostage Michel Germaneau on Saturday July 24, 2010, to avenge the killing of our six brothers in the cowardly French raid," on Thursday, AQIM chief Abu Musab Abdul Wadud said.

"Sarkozy failed to free his compatriot in this operation but he has, without any doubt, opened for his people and for his country one of the gates of hell," Wadud warned.

"In a rapid and just response to the ignoble actions of France, we announce that we have executed the French hostage."

The emergency meeting at 9:00 am would include Prime Minister Francois Fillon, Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux, Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner and Defence Minister Herve Morin, the president's office announced.

The French presidency said it had received "no confirmation" of the killing of Germaneau, who was kidnapped in northern Niger on April 19, adding that it was trying to verify the claim.

But a senior French official who asked not to be named told AFP Sunday that Paris was convinced that Germaneau had "been dead for several weeks."

On May 14, his abductors issued a photo of an exhausted-looking Germaneau, together with a taped message in which he appealed to Sarkozy to work for his release.

He said he suffered from a serious heart illness and had no more medication and that he was struggling with the heat.

Germaneau's Algerian driver, who was also abducted, was later released. He said the Frenchman was being held in a desert zone in Mali.

AQIM on July 11 gave France a 15-day deadline to help secure the release of its members in the region, warning that Germaneau would be killed if Paris failed to comply.

The looming deadline saw between 20 and 30 French soldiers involved in a raid Thursday on a remote camp in the Malian desert by Mauritanian forces.

Six members of AQIM, an offshoot of Osama bin Laden's network, were killed in the operation, officials have said.

Documents, bomb-making equipment, guns and ammunition were found during the pre-dawn assault but soldiers found no evidence that Germaneau had been held there.

Earlier on Sunday, Mali security sources expressed growing fears for Germaneau's fate after the failed raid and the mayor of the Paris region where he lived said he believed the hostage's chances of survival were slim.

"Either Michel Germaneau has been executed, or the terrorists are about to do it," Olivier Thomas, the mayor of Marcoussis, told AFP.

Germaneau was working with the Enmilal aid agency to improve health services and schools at the time of his kidnap.

France has said it had received no direct demands from Germaneau's kidnappers but was taking their reported threat to kill him seriously.

AQIM is also holding two Spaniards in the region after kidnapping them more than seven months ago: Albert Vilalta, 35, and 50-year-old Roque Pascual.

France had "consulted" Spain over Thursday's operation, said a French defence ministry source.

The raid had prompted "anxiety" in Madrid over how it might affect the Spanish hostages, according to Spanish media reports.

AQIM has also been held responsible for the murder of British hostage Edwin Dyer, 60, who was kidnapped by Islamic extremists in the Sahel region bordering the Sahara desert in January 2009.

Malian authorities blamed that killing on AQIM cell leader Abou Zeid, also known as Abib Hammadou, a 43-year-old Algerian who is listed on United Nations documents as a known Al-Qaeda member.

© 2010 AFP
This story is sourced direct from an overseas news agency as an additional service to readers. Spelling follows North American usage, along with foreign currency and measurement units.

buglerbilly

28-07-10, 12:14 AM

France declares war against al-Qaeda

July 28, 2010 - 7:04AM

France has declared war on al-Qaeda, and matched its fighting words with a first attack on a base camp of the terror network's North African branch, after the terror network killed a French humanitarian worker it took hostage in April.

The declaration and attack marked a shift in strategy for France, usually discrete about its behind-the-scenes battle against terrorism.

"We are at war with al-Qaeda," Prime Minister Francois Fillon said on Tuesday, a day after President Nicolas Sarkozy announced the death of 78-year-old hostage Michel Germaneau. The humanitarian worker had been abducted April 20 or 22 in Niger by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, and was later taken to Mali, officials said.

The Salafist Group for Call and Combat formally merged with al-Qaeda in 2006 and spread through the Sahel region - parts of Mauritania, Mali and Niger.

"It's a universal threat that concerns the entire world ... not just France or the West," Defence Minister Herve Morin said Tuesday on France-2 television. "We will support local authorities so these assassins and (their) commanders are tracked, judged and taken before justice and punished. And, yes, we will help them."

The United States said it would help the French "in any way that we can" to bring those who killed Germaneau to justice, according to US State Department spokesman PJ Crowley.

On Thursday, the French backed Mauritanian forces in attacking an al-Qaeda camp on the border with Mali, killing at least six suspected terrorists.

Experts confirmed it was the first attack outside Algeria on an al-Qaeda base, and the first known time France has taken part.

France said it was a last-ditch effort to save its citizen, while Mauritania said it was trying to stop an imminent attack by fighters gathering at the base. For the French, the move may have backfired. The al-Qaeda group said in an audio message broadcast on Sunday that it had killed Germaneau in retaliation for the raid. However, French officials suggested, however, that the hostage, who had a heart problem, may already have been dead. Even now, "We have no proof of life or death," Morin said.

An estimated 400-500 such fighters are thought to roam the Sahel region, a desert expanse as large as the European Union.

Despite meager numbers, the region's al-Qaeda fighters pose a clear threat. Among the more recent victims, a British captive was beheaded last year and two Spanish aid workers were taken hostage in Mauritania in November. Spain is working to free them. Mauritanian soldiers also have fallen in numerous attacks.

AP

buglerbilly

20-09-10, 01:38 PM

Why the U.S. Should Send Troops (and Spooks) to the Congo

By David Axe September 20, 2010 | 12:01 am

The Congolese army pursues the LRA in 2009. Photo by Ferruccio Gobbi.

DUNGU, Democratic Republic of Congo — They arrive in the night like monsters. In northeastern Congo, in a swath of thick forest the size of some European countries, the apocalyptic Lord’s Resistance Army rebel group is a constant, foreboding presence. The LRA’s fighters — many of them kidnapped teens — murder, abduct, rape and pillage while constantly eluding a half-heartedly pursuing Congolese army.

Suzane Fulale was just 15 when she was kidnapped last year and forced to “marry” an LRA fighter. Freed by a Ugandan army raid, today the slightly-built Fulale is mother to an eight-month-old “LRA baby.” When she recounts her months in captivity, she casts her dark eyes to the ground and speaks in a barely-audible whisper.

Fulale’s is the human face of an escalating but (in the West) rarely-reported crisis. In Sudan, in the Central African Republic, and especially in Congo, border-hopping LRA fighters drive before them thousands of refugees, disrupt agriculture and transportation, and undermine already-fragile governments. In short, the LRA is one of the greatest dangers in a part of the world that’s full of them. And there’s a possible, clear-cut American military solution — a rare thing in this era of seemingly endless counter-insurgency campaigns. But does Washington care enough to act?

I’m in Congo at the moment reporting and researching a new graphic novel. This is the refrain I’ve heard numerous times from U.S. government sources and the aid community, always off the record: Unlike insurgent groups such as the Taliban, Somalia’s Al Shabab or one of Congo’s other rebel armies, these days LRA doesn’t want anything except to survive and pillage. They don’t have political aims. There’s no hope of accommodating them as a group. What began in the 1980s as a Ugandan rebel movement with actual grievances is now just a roving tribe of killers. The LRA is organized around a half-dozen key chieftans answering to top man Joseph Kony, who loosely directs scattered bands of fighters by way of stolen satellite phones. If you want to destroy the LRA, sources say, you only need to kill or capture the leaders: there’s no grassroots support that would sustain the LRA while it rebuilds its leadership.

Problem is, Congo can’t handle the task of taking down the LRA. With just 300 miles of paved roads in the whole country and no air force to speak of, the Congolese military can’t move fast enough to keep up with the LRA. Besides, the Congolese army has been cobbled together from various former rebel groups plus troops inherited from the country’s previous regime. “There is very little discipline,” Marcel Stoessel, Congo director for the aid group Oxfam U.K., said of the Congolese army. To beat the LRA, Congo needs help from an army adept at locating elusive groups in rough terrain, and an air force trained to speed small, lethal teams to the battle zone. Sound like any military we know?

Two years ago, the U.S. formed a new command to handle most of the African continent. Africa Command — based in Germany to avoid accusations of colonialism — is by necessity a new kind of military organization. With most American forces devoted to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Africom has to be pretty light. There are just a few thousand people permanently assigned, many of them civilian contractors. When Africom needs a couple hundred troops for a training exercise or some small-scale humanitarian operation, it borrows them from the National Guard or some other, bigger regional command.

Africom is not designed to mount Afghanistan-size wars. It’s all about brief, targeted intervention, influence and the Pentagon’s new favorite word, “partnership.” “Admittedly, this is an indirect and long-term approach,” Maj. Gen. William Garrett, then-commander of Africom’s land troops, told me earlier this year. Recently, U.S. Special Forces helped form a new “model” Congolese army battalion. And earlier this month in Kinshasa, Congo’s sprawling capital, a hundred U.S. Army doctors and medics teamed up with 250 Congolese personnel for a couple weeks of training. “The U.S. has determined it wants to be more involved in Africa,” explained Army Lt. Col. Todd Johnston, the exercise commander.

So why not get involved where it can really help? That’s what advocates of U.S. action in Congo are asking. After all, this is a mineral-rich country that takes millions and millions in foreign donations, mostly from America. So find the LRA, and kill or capture the chiefs before they make an already desperate country even worse.

But do it the Africom way. No massive troop deployment. No occupation. No drawn-out conflict. No headline news in the U.S. Just a few spooks, a few commandos, some airplanes and choppers and the permission of Congolese president Joseph Kabila. By American military standards, it wouldn’t take much. But it would make life a lot safer for millions of people in Central Africa — and might help reduce the cost to the world of keeping Congo on life support. Plus, it could show the way forward for a smarter, less expensive American way of war.

There are just two problems. First, the U.S. military has tried taking out the LRA before, albeit indirectly — and failed. Last year, Ugandan and U.N. forces acting on U.S.-provided intelligence launched an offensive aimed at taking out LRA leadership. But the rebels escaped … and killed hundreds of civilians as they hacked their way deeper into the forest.

Second, despite a growing body of legislation meant to define America’s role in Congo’s conflicts, at the moment there’s no clear U.S. policy regarding Congo and no prospect of one emerging anytime soon. The U.S. military might be the best solution to Congo’s LRA problem, but it’s a solution lacking one key component: political will.

Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/09/why-the-u-s-should-send-troops-and-spooks-to-the-congo/#more-31113#ixzz104K79m1l

buglerbilly

21-09-10, 03:01 AM

Al-Qaeda 'expand into Uganda'

Concerns are growing that al-Qaeda may have expanded its East African operations into Uganda after a British man was arrested on terrorism charges on his way to Entebbe.

By Duncan Gardham, Security Correspondent, and Mike Pflanz in Nairobi for the UK Daily Telegraph

Published: 6:56PM BST 20 Sep 2010

Survivors of the Kampala attacks look on moments after twin bomb blasts tore through crowds of football fans watching the World Cup final Photo: AFP/GETTY

Western security sources have told The Daily Telegraph that attacks on football fans watching the World Cup final in Uganda had been carried out by "Al-Qaeda in East Africa," rather than the Somali group al-Shabaab which claimed responsibility.

US officials have talked recently of an increase of al-Qaeda activity in East Africa where militants have been helping train al-Shabaab fighters.

Al-Shabaab has claimed allegiance to al-Qaeda but its ability to launch attacks outside the country had been limited until the Kampala attacks in July. The group has recently been involved in heavy fighting in the Somali capital Mogadishu.

Last night Dutch security officials were continuing to question a British man of Somali origin who was arrested on a plane at Schiphol airport on his way from Liverpool to Entebbe.

Dutch prosecutors said they were investigating the man for links to a terrorist organisation but had not found any explosives.

A European diplomat in Kampala, Uganda's capital, said the man arrested in Amsterdam could have been acting as a copycat after the publicity following the Ugandan attack, which was blamed on the presence of Ugandan troops in Somalia under an African Union peace keeping mandate.

"The problem with something like the World Cup bombings is that it puts Uganda on the map of copycat attackers, who might not even really have known Uganda was involved [in Somalia] before," the diplomat said.

"This man could have been coming here to cause a nuisance, rather than because militants in Mogadishu were controlling him."

A security consultant specialising on Somalia said there was the "sense that the World Cup bombings were going to be a one-off, and al-Shabaab sent those guys here from Somalia."

But he added: "Then you see someone who's raised an alert being arrested on their way to Entebbe, and it sets off a lot of alarm bells. There may be no evidence yet that al-Shabaab is bedding down cells in Uganda for more attacks – but that doesn't mean they are not doing it."

Most foreigners wanting to join al-Shabaab's ranks are believed to fly to Kenya and then cross the porous land border with Somalia, or to fly to the northern semi-autonomous state of Somaliland and then travel south from there.

To travel to Uganda and then intend to reach Somalia would involve crossing at least two international borders.

buglerbilly

21-09-10, 03:15 AM

French aircraft join hunt for hostages abducted in Sahara desert

France will do everything to free hostages, says government after seven are kidnapped by suspected al-Qaida militants

Xan Rice in Nairobi guardian.co.uk, Monday 20 September 2010 19.13 BST

A Mirage F1 fighter has been deployed to look for the seven hostages. Photograph: Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images

French anti-terror troops are co-ordinating an aerial search for seven hostages who were abducted in the Sahara desert in Niger by suspected al-Qaida militants last week.

Around 80 French anti-terror specialists set up base in a hotel in the capital, Niamey, at the weekend following an invitation from Niger's government to pursue the kidnappers on its soil.

Long-range reconnaissance planes equipped with infrared sensors are searching the desert in the north of the country, where the hostages were seized from their homes on Thursday, as well as the rugged fringes of neighbouring Mali, where it is thought they may be being held.

"Their mission is to help Niger's military find the seven kidnapped people," said Niger government spokesman Mahamane Laouali Dan Dah.

The victims are five French nationals, among them a couple, a Togolese national and a Malagasy. They were working at a uranium mine owned by the French company Areva near the town of Arlit, 500 miles north-east of Niamey. The other expatriates based on site were evacuated today.

The military operation reflects the deep concern over the safety of the hostages, who the French government believe were taken by al-Quaida's North Africa wing. The group, known as al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM, has been increasingly active in recent years, causing headaches for local governments and western countries whose citizens are the main targets for abduction.

The militants have a reputation for brutality. They killed a 78-year-old French hostage, Michel Germaneau, in July, after a failed rescue attempt by French commandos. At the time, France's prime minister, François Fillon, said his country was "at war" with AQIM. The group's fighters also executed Edwin Dyer, a Briton, in May 2009. However, two Spanish aid workers held captive for almost nine months were freed in August. Despite the failure to free Germaneau by force, the French government has refused to rule out another rescue attempt.

"France will do everything to free the hostages," Luc Chatel, a spokesman for the French government, said on Sunday.

The kidnappers have geography on their side. The terrain and temperature in the Sahel-Sahara region are extremely hostile, while smugglers and bandits, moving freely across the borders, also pose threats to outsiders.

The hostages and their captors were last seen moving north-west from Arlit, whose uranium riches form the mainstay of Niger's economy, towards Mali. The French forces are using a Breguet Atlantique reconnaissance aircraft and a Mirage jet to try to track them down.

Niger's decision to invite the French military into the country for the first time in 25 years highlights the strong local concern about AQIM's activities. Forces from Mauritania, which France has assisted in its counterinsurgency operations in recent months, are fighting the Islamist militants on the country's soil, as well as in Mali, which has given its neighbour permission to use its airspace. Mauritania's defence ministry claimed to have killed 12 AQIM rebels over the weekend in operations meant to prevent further attacks in the region. Six soldiers also died.

The rebels operating in Mauritania are reported to be led by Yahya Abu Hamam, a deputy of the Algerian Islamist Abdelhamid Abu Zeid, who is accused of ordering the killing of Germaneau and Dyer.

buglerbilly

12-10-10, 04:11 AM

Al-Qaida in Africa Emerges as Threat to Europe

October 11, 2010

Associated Press

ALGIERS, Algeria - While Europe's latest terror threat stems from militants in Pakistan, a potentially greater menace lies just across the Mediterranean: Well-organized and financed Islamic terrorists from al-Qaida's North African offshoot.

Over the last month alone, the group has been accused of seizing five French nationals and two Africans from a mining town in Niger, part of its effort to make millions by kidnapping Europeans and getting ransoms. It is also blamed for a truck bombing last Saturday in Algeria that left five soldiers dead.

Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb effectively rules a wide, lawless swath of the Sahara and is trying to overthrow Algeria's government. It's active online and media-savvy, and has the globally recognized al-Qaida brand name. It has also sparked arrests in Spain and France.

The question now is how far it has the will and means to turn its anger on Europe.

French and U.S. counterintelligence officials suggest AQIM's logistics and networks aren't yet mature enough to stage an attack on a European capital, but say it's a broad and constant threat. France's prime minister said Friday that the group is in touch with fellow fighters in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The U.S. military is worried enough that it trains African armies to resist AQIM.

"For years, I've said this - and we've known - that AQIM has capabilities to project outwards outside of Africa. ... It's just that no one understands the dynamics from Europe to Africa and back to Afghanistan," said Rudolph Atallah, retired from his post as Africa Counterterrorism Director in the office of the U.S. Secretary of Defense and who now runs private security firm White Mountain Research.

"Can AQIM carry out an attack in Europe? Yeah, I think so."

For Europe, homegrown terrorists have long been a central concern. French authorities watch out for dual nationals who fall under AQIM's spell, via extremist websites or preachers in private prayer meetings in poor suburbs. Algerian militants who blended in with Europe's large North African immigrant community were linked to the 2004 Madrid bombings and killed eight and wounded scores of people in the 1990s in attacks in the Paris Metro.

"If unfortunately a terrorist operation occurs, it will come from networks within those European nations," said Mohand Berkouk, political scientist at the University of Algiers who specalizes in Sahara and Sahel geostrategy.

The U.S. government warned Americans this week of new terror risks in Europe. Focus fell on Pakistan, where U.S. drones have struck suspected al-Qaida targets and where Pakistani officials say eight German militants have been killed.

But two French counterintelligence officials said in recent days that terrorists tied to AQIM - and not Pakistan - are France's No. 1 security threat. One official says at least six AQIM-related cells have been dismantled across Europe in recent years. Both spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

French National Police Chief Frederic Pechenard said last week that authorities suspect AQIM of plotting a bomb attack on a crowded target.

AQIM's operational ability to target something as prominent and well-guarded as the Eiffel Tower - evacuated twice in recent weeks because of bomb threats - remains unclear. A senior U.S. counterterrorism official said AQIM is still considered an "underperforming" terror group that is quite dangerous in the region but not yet as able to direct attacks much beyond that.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters, said AQIM has faced internal battles, and as long as it is under pressure from Algerian security forces, it has been harder for them to export terror outside the region.

AQIM was born in 2006 when al-Qaida adopted a violent group of Islamic insurgents in Algeria called the GSPC. The nucleus of devoted radicals proved ready to recruit and train fighters for Afghanistan and Iraq, and gave Osama Bin Laden's network a potential forward base to attack Europe.

Today, AQIM is believed to have about 400 fighters active from Niger to Mali and Mauritania, conducts dozens of bombings or ambushes each month in Algeria, holds hostages and has increasingly bonded with drug traffickers, intelligence officials say.

AQIM's long-term goal is to create an Islamic state stretching beyond North Africa, and it has repeatedly threatened both France and Spain. France has troops in Afghanistan, a colonial history in North Africa and a new law forbidding Islamic face veils. Al-Qaida also says the reconquest of al-Andalus is a priority, referring to the period of Muslim rule of much of Spain in medieval times.

Analysts say AQIM is really a shadowy network of Algerian-based cells, with three particularly eye-catching figures.

Abdelmalek Droukdel is its overall boss in northern Algeria, and rose up during the insurgency against Algeria's government.

Mokhtar bel Mokhtar, known as "the one-eyed sheik" because he fought in Afghanistan and lost an eye in combat, boosted AQIM's expansion by building a bridge with the criminal underworld, bringing in outlaws and enrolling local youth.

Meanwhile Abou Zeid, also known as Mosab Abdelouadoud and the "Emir of the South," appears to have carved out a role for himself as key kidnapper. Zeid held a Frenchman released in February, and another executed in July. He's also been linked to the execution of a British hostage in 2009.

Other AQIM hostages have hailed from Spain, Austria and Switzerland. No country has ever acknowledged paying a ransom, though such payouts are widely reported.

Spanish media said the government, via intermediaries, arranged payment of as much as $9.7 million for the release of three Spanish aid workers who were abducted last November in Mauritania. On Thursday, the Spanish Foreign Ministry denied - again - that the government paid money to kidnappers or middlemen.

Algeria's African affairs minister, Abdelkader Messahel, decries ransom payments, calling for the U.N. to intervene to fight them.

"It's not enough to say that we are against the payment of ransoms to terrorists. European institutions must take measures to criminalize this act," he said on Algerian radio.

For Algeria, AQIM is a nightmare that authorities had hoped ended after the insurgency in the 1990s that left some 200,000 dead.

Today's attacks are scattered but regular. On Saturday, a remote-controlled bomb killed five troops on a truck in a convoy in the town of Zekri in the Kabylie region. On Monday, Algerian authorities dismantled a cell of 13 people supporting Islamic militants in the Tlemcen region. Algeria, the regional powerhouse, has created with its neighbors a joint military command headquarters in Tamanrasset in the southern desert.

A greater concern for U.S. and French officials are weaker governments to the south, particularly Mali. A counter-terrorism action group created at France's urging will meet in Mali next week to boost the region's efforts to fight terrorism.

AQIM is using the same smuggling routes across the Sahara once used for contraband coming from and headed to Europe, said Africa expert Peter Pham, senior vice president at the National Committee on American Foreign Policy.

Last week, a U.S. citizen of Algerian origin was arrested in Spain on suspicion of financing the al-Qaida affiliate by sending money to an associate in Algeria. He was released for lack of evidence, but ordered to check in with police daily pending further investigation.

AQIM suspects have turned up in unexpected places, such as at the world's largest atom smasher in Switzerland. A French nuclear physicist of Algerian origin who worked there was arrested last year. Prosecutors said Adlene Hicheur had discussed possible terrorist attacks targeting France's army - with AQIM.

© Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

buglerbilly

12-10-10, 05:35 AM

Al-Qaeda demand end of French burka ban in return for hostages

Al-Qaeda in North Africa has demanded that France overturns its burka ban in return for the release of five French hostages kidnapped in the African state of Niger.

Published: 4:27PM BST 11 Oct 2010

A niqab clad woman buys candy in the Carrousel du Louvre, in Paris, France Photo: CORBIS

The group is also demanding 7 million euros (£6.1 million) and the release of Islamic militants being held in France as part of their conditions.

Seven captives – five French citizens and two Africans – were abducted in Niger a month ago before being taken to neighbouring Mali.

The kidnappings marked an escalation of tensions between Paris and al-Qaeda's north African network, known as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which executed 78-year-old French hostage Michel Germaneau in July.

But a French intelligence source yesterday described the terms for the hostages release as "unrealistic".

France's burka ban crossed its final legal hurdle last week, making it illegal for anyone to hide their faces in public. It will come into force early next year, and means women will then face jail for wearing the full Islamic face veil.

The law was passed despite separate threats from al-Qaeda chiefs to seek "dreadful revenge" if it is ever enforced.

The French spy source told news agency AFP that initial contacts with AQIM through local chiefs in Mali were "not encouraging" due to the nature of the demands.

The source added: "The abductors have unrealistic demands which Mali and France cannot accept, including withdrawing a ban on the face veil in France and the release of some of the group's elements detained in France, Mauritania and other countries."

France's new law was passed after a year of national debate on burkas and niqabs, and mounting public tensions over the issue.

There is also widespread support for a similar ban in the Netherlands, while Switzerland recently voted to ban the construction of new minarets on mosques.

The French burka ban also comes amid warnings of a heightened terrorist threat across Europe.

buglerbilly

22-10-10, 03:06 AM

North African states at risk of being overrun by al-Qaeda

Al-Qaeda is poised to overrun five states in North Africa and the Middle East, creating terrorist safe havens from which the network can launch attack on the West, Europe and the US have been warned.

By Praveen Swami, Diplomatic Editor, UK Daily Telegraph

Published: 9:00PM BST 21 Oct 2010

Large swathes of Somalia are already under the control of al-Shabaab, a Somali al-Qaeda affiliate Photo: REUTERS

Mauritania, Mali and Niger have seen a steady escalation of al-Qaeda activity targeting Western aid workers and experts. Somalia, to their east, has disintegrated in the face of Islamist assault. In Yemen, across the Red Sea from Somalia, security forces have been waging a losing battle against resurgent jihadist armies that have claimed the lives of dozens of troops.

Amadou Marou, the President of Niger's National Consultative Council has been in Europe with a grim message for governments. "Somalia got away from us", he said, "and northern Mali is in the process of getting away from us".

Mohamed Abdillahi Mohamed, Somalia's new Prime Minister, has also called on the US and Europe to "step up to the plate". Aid to Somalia, he said, "is not an option, it's a necessity. We are dealing with al-Shabaab, who are extremists and seeking to take their war throughout the world".

Al-Qaeda's regional affiliates have expanded dramatically throughout this belt of states, exploiting the administrative weaknesses and corruption of their governments.

Large swathes of Somalia are already under the control of al-Shabaab, a Somali al-Qaeda affiliate, which is known to have hundreds of US and UK citizens among its ranks. Western intelligence services say they have evidence that those recruits are preparing for attacks on the West.

Last month, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, its north African branch, kidnapped seven people, including five French citizens, from a uranium mine in Niger. AQIM has demanded a ransom of £5 million and a rollback on France's burka ban for the lives of the hostages Mauritania has been engaged in pitched battles with AQIM, and the country's air force has been bombing jihadist targets in northern Mali the region where British tourist Edwin Dyer was executed by terrorists last year.

Mauritanian jihadists also murdered an American aid worker last year, and earlier attacked Israel's embassy to the country.

Yemen, which is home to another al-Qaeda affiliate called al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, has served as hub for several plots targeting the West, often carried out by western citizens inspired by the charismatic Islamist televangelist Anwar al-Awlaki.

"There's obviously a lot that needs doing in countries like Somalia", says Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, an American counter-terrorism expert, "but it isn't obvious how to do what needs doing".

Local efforts to address the problem have had little success. Amisom, the African Union's 7,000-strong peacekeeping force in Somalia, has been unable to restore government control over even the capital, Mogadishu. Peacekeepers received no wages for six months last year. Poor security conditions have made aid work all but impossible.

Experts say aid should be focused not just on upgrading regional counter-terrorism forces, but also addressing the poverty and poor governance that have helped al-Qaeda gain ground in the region.

Britain is a key member of Friends of Yemen, an international consortium that has committed to pumping millions of pounds into the country. But although Yemen has committed to economic reforms and anti-corruption measures, there are still doubts about just how much the aid has achieved on the ground.

buglerbilly

14-01-11, 01:33 AM

Al Qaeda claims kidnap of French hostages in Niger

Al Qaeda declared on Thursday it was behind the kidnap of two young Frenchmen in Niger, as prosecutors began to unravel the murky circumstances of the battle in the Sahara that led to their deaths.

Vincent Delory (L) and Antoine de Leocour were grabbed by gunmen as they ate their evening meal in Niamey Photo: AFP/GETTY

12:03AM GMT 14 Jan 2011

At least nine people – both hostages, four kidnappers and three Nigerien gendarmes – were killed on Saturday when French special forces launched an airborne assault against an al Qaeda convoy in the Mali desert.

But, almost a week later, the precise circumstances of the failed rescue remain unclear, with wildly differing accounts from the French government, its ally Niger and the Islamist militant group's North African wing.

French prosecutors and anti-terror police have launched an investigation and on Thursday staged a reconstruction of Friday's initial kidnap, in which two 25-year-old Frenchmen were snatched from a Niamey restaurant.

Witnesses, officials and al Qaeda seem to be in agreement as to how this took place – Vincent Delory and Antoine de Leocour were grabbed by gunmen as they ate their evening meal in the "Toulousain" in Niger's capital.

Two white pickup trucks pulled up in front of the restaurant, five or six gunmen came down from the first and stormed in, holding off the Frenchmen's Nigerien friends at gunpoint, Paris prosecutors said.

Paris chief prosecutor Jean-Claude Marin played down rumours the pair had been specifically targeted, perhaps because Leocour planned to marry a Muslim Nigerien woman, saying the evidence suggested they were picked at random.

From Niamey, the gunmen drove the pair north into the desert heading for the border with Mali, where Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) is reputed to have a network of secret and inaccessible base camps.

Their flight was tracked by French spy planes and Nigerien troops, and there was at least one clash on Nigerien soil before they crossed the border.

Nigerien forces invoked a regional "right of hot pursuit" and crossed the border into Mali to hunt the hostage-takers, still heading north through the Tabankor district, south of the town of Menaka.

They came upon a group of vehicles concealed under camouflaged tarpaulins and a fierce battle erupted. At least one Nigerien gendarme was killed, Mr Marin said, before French forces arrived and launched a "final assault".

French commandos arrived by helicopter and, according to Malian sources, opened fire from the air. French investigators have not ruled out the idea that one hostage was killed when a French bullet ignited a petrol tank.

"Two heroic clashes between the mujahideen and the French and Niger forces took place and resulted in a catastrophic failure to free the two hostages," AQIM said, in a message aired on the Al-Jazeera satellite network.

AQIM claimed its men killed two French soldiers during the battle, but France denies this, reporting two wounded among its ranks. Mr Marin said that nine corpses were recovered after the battle, including both hostages.

French leaders have accused AQIM of executing the prisoners in cold blood, but Mr Marin confirmed only that Leocour had died after being shot once in the face at point blank range – "close enough to touch".

He said Delory's cause of death was more difficult to establish. The second hostage suffered at least five gunshot wounds and was severely burned, and it is not clear if he had died from injuries, smoke inhalation or burns.

"Was he killed in the first exchange of fire, or the second, or in the final assault? For the moment, the forensic evidence doesn't allow us to say," Mr Marin told reporters in Paris.

The fate of the three dead Nigerien gendarmes was also unproven.

Earlier in the day, the French defence ministry had said its troops had been forced to fire on men in Nigerien uniform who had attacked the commandos and appeared to be working with the kidnappers.

"The people in the Niger gendarmerie uniforms did not have their hands tied, and were carrying weapons. They participated in the action against our forces," said French defence ministry spokesman Laurent Teisseire.

A senior Niger official denied this.

"These Nigerien gendarmes were pursuing AQIM. Nigerien troops have never fought alongside AQIM," he insisted. "We have a military vehicle damaged at the place where the French army launched its assault.

"I am not saying the French soldiers did it on purpose, but the soldiers whose bodies the French brought to Niamey died by French fire," he said.

Several kidnappings of foreigners in the arid Sahel region spanning Niger, Mali, Mauritania and Algeria have been carried out by or on behalf of AQIM.

The group is holding five French citizens, a Togolese and a Madagascan, reportedly in northern Mali, after they were seized from Niger's uranium mining town of Arlit in September.

In July, AQIM killed a 78-year-old French hostage after six militants were killed in a joint French-Mauritanian rescue bid.

buglerbilly

20-01-11, 03:04 AM

Ares

A Defense Technology Blog

French Army Intervention in Niger Criticised

Posted by Christina Mackenzie at 1/19/2011 6:09 AM CST

France's new defense minister (and former prime minister), Alain Juppé has had a baptism of fire. He is being criticised, even being asked to resign, for allowing French troops, in coordination with Nigerian ones, to fire on members of Al Qaida in Islamic Maghreb (AQMI) who had taken two 25-year old Frenchmen hostage. The two were found dead.
Antoine de Léocour and Vincent Delory, were kidnapped on Jan. 7 while dining at a restaurant in Niamey, the capital of Niger, simply because they happened to be sitting closest to the door and the AQMI terrorists had received orders to kidnap French people.

AQMI claimed Delory was killed by bullets from French airborne forces but the five bullets have since been identified as coming from a Kalashnikov, a weapon not used by French forces. He was also badly burned. De Léocour was shot at point-blank range.

“It would appear that France's new policy is that showing firmness with regards to AQMI should override regard for the lives of hostages,” says Marie-Pierre Allié, president of Médecins sans frontières (MSF) (Doctors Without Borders, a non-governmental organization) in the daily Le Monde. MSF is directly concerned by this policy because a number of its volunteers work in countries where kidnapping and terrorism are rife.

When questioned by Le Monde as to why France chose a military intervention to free the hostages, Juppé says “we are fighting terrorism, like our European and American allies. And there has been no strategic about-turn. I would like to remind you that a few months ago [when Hervé Morin was defense minister] we backed the Mauritanian operation to try and free our hostage Michel Germaneau [it failed: Germaneau, 78, was executed by his kidnappers]. France will do everything to protect its nationals and intends to show determination to discourage acts of terrorism. France must not undertake this battle alone as it concerns the countries of the region. We must get Mauritania, Mali, Niger and Algeria to work more together to combat terrorism.”

France, which has a long history of providing military training to its former colonies, is re-configuring its training towards anti-terrorism skills. Five hundred Mauritanian soldiers have already been trained since 2008.

Seven employees (five French, one Togolese and one Malagasy) of the French nuclear group Areva and its sub-contractor Satom, have been held hostage since mid-September 2010, by AQMI it is believed, in northeast Mali. Juppé has criticised the group's security plan “which has still not been validated by the Nigerian authorities.”

buglerbilly

27-08-11, 03:16 AM

AUGUST 27, 2011.

Bomb Hits U.N. Building in Nigeria Capital

Deadly Blast Strikes Offices in Abuja; Local Militant Islamist Group Is Suspected of Beginning to Target Foreigners.

By WILL CONNORS

LAGOS, Nigeria—A suicide bomber struck the United Nations building in the Nigerian capital Abuja, killing about a dozen people, in an attack that security experts say could signal the shift of a homegrown extremist group now gunning for foreign targets.

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Rescue workers carry a wounded man from the bombed building.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the blast, but security analysts said the most likely culprit is the northern Nigerian radical Muslim sect known as Boko Haram.

A Red Cross spokesman in Abuja said a precise casualty figure wouldn't be clear until all the agencies working at the scene give updates. Local hospitals said they were besieged with the injured.

Associated Press
A victim of the July 2010 attack on a restaurant in Kampala, Uganda.

Late Friday morning, a vehicle packed with explosives drove through the exit gate of the U.N. building and into the lobby, detonating the bomb, U.N. and Nigerian security officials said.

Witnesses said they saw a car speeding toward the U.N. building before ramming into the wing that houses the U.N. Children's Fund, or Unicef.

"We saw that someone had driven into the gate with a bomb," said a man named Dioka, a staff member of the U.N. Development Program in Abuja, who gave his first name only. "People [are] still sifting through the rubble to see who survived and who didn't."

U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq said the compound in Abuja was well fortified, with barricades and gates around the building. "It was regarded as a well-defended building," he said. "We will investigate how our defenses were broached."

The UNDP staffer, Dioka, and several other witnesses, however, said it would have been easy to enter the compound without encountering security, especially at the exit gate.

Mr. Haq said the U.N. has been increasing security world-wide. Terrorist groups have begun targeting the organization in several countries. In 2003, al Qaeda in Iraq bombed U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, killing 22 U.N. staffers, including Brazilian Sergio Vieira de Mello, head of the mission, which had been established five days earlier. A car bomb set by another wing of al Qaeda hit two U.N. buildings in Algiers in 2007, killing 31, including 17 staff members. In 2009, three Taliban attackers stormed a U.N. guest house in Kabul, killing 5 staffers. This year, protesters angry at the burning of a Quran by Florida pastor Terry Jones, killed seven U.N. workers and five Afghans in Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the Nigerian compound housed 26 U.N. humanitarian and development agencies. "This was an assault on those who devote their lives to helping others," he said.

Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan issued a statement later in the day, calling the bombing "barbaric, senseless and cowardly," and vowed to "vigorously combat" terrorism in Nigeria.

Nigerian National Security Adviser Gen. Andrew Azazi said it was still uncertain who was behind the attack. He said it is possible Boko Haram was responsible, and that the group may have received assistance from terrorist groups outside Nigeria, such as al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

"We've never shied away from the fact that it's possible that there are outside connections with Boko Haram," Gen. Azazi said. "When there's a problem, you investigate. You look for clues, you interview people."

Although Boko Haram has carried out a series of increasingly deadly attacks over the past year, it hasn't hit a foreign target. A bomb attack on a U.N. compound would mark a significant turn in the tactics of the group, whose name roughly translated means "Western education is prohibited." The group seeks a stricter interpretation of Islamic law applied throughout Nigeria.

Boko Haram leadership wants to "confirm that they are not just a Nigerian terrorist group. They are now an international terrorist group," said Martin Ewi, senior researcher on counterterrorism at the Institute for Security Studies in South Africa.

President Barack Obama said in a statement: "I strongly condemn today's horrific and cowardly attack on the United Nations headquarters building in Abuja, Nigeria, which killed and wounded many innocent civilians from Nigeria and around the world."

Nigeria has been grappling with Islamic militancy at home, and there is speculation these fighters may be seeking links with foreign terror groups.

On Christmas Day 2009, a 23-year-old Nigerian man attempted to ignite explosives concealed in his underwear on a Northwest Airlines flight to Detroit. He later said had been trained by al Qaeda outside Nigeria.

More recently, Nigerian security agencies have been struggling to check the spread of Boko Haram after a series deadly bombings signaled the group's ambitions to spread its activities beyond the country's north.

In June, police attributed two attacks in Maiduguri—a city in Nigeria's north—to Boko Haram. A bombing at a Maiduguri beer garden killed 25 people, and another attack killed three more.

Security officials say that while some members of Boko Haram may have received training in nearby Niger or Chad, there aren't definitive ties to foreign terrorist groups.

Security agencies became aware of Boko Haram when its leaders began preaching extremist rhetoric in the mid-2000s. The group gained additional supporters after Nigerian police killed several hundred members in a 2009 crackdown. Its then-leader, Mohamed Yusuf, was killed by police while in custody.

Boko Haram is just one of Nigeria's militant groups. Last October, 12 people were killed in Abuja when two car bombs were detonated during celebrations to mark the 50th anniversary of Nigeria's independence from Britain. The next day, Henry Okah, a former leader of the militant Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, or MEND, was arrested in Johannesburg and charged by South African authorities with masterminding the attacks.

He is set to face trial in January at South Africa's high court, where prosecutors aim to prove he orchestrated the attacks from exile in South Africa, and that their intended target was Nigeria's president, Goodluck Jonathan.

Mr. Okah, 46 years old, denies being involved in the attacks and said he is no longer a leader of MEND, a group that has claimed responsibility for many attacks against oil companies operating in the Niger delta.

—Joe Lauria at the U.N.
and Patrick McGroarty
in Johannesburg
contributed to this article.

buglerbilly

27-08-11, 03:22 AM

Suicide attack hits Algerian military academy

At least 18 killed after car loaded with explosives detonated outside academy in Cherchell, west of Algiers

Associated Press

guardian.co.uk, Saturday 27 August 2011 00.06 BST

A suicide bomber detonated a car loaded with explosives outside a military academy west of the Algerian capital on Friday, killing at least 18 people.

At least 20 were wounded at the academy in Cherchell, which lies west of Algiers. The death toll was expected to rise, according to the Sidi Ghilas hospital where the victims were taken. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing policy, gave conflicting tolls, and it was not clear whether those killed were troops or civilians.Friday was a sacred day in the Muslim calendar that falls toward the end of the holy month of Ramadan, and it is often accompanied by attacks. Although no one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, similar assaults have been blamed on al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb.

Islamist extremists have battled Algerian security forces since 1992 when the army cancelled a national election that a now-banned Muslim fundamentalist party was poised to win.

Security forces gained the upper hand over the years, but sporadic attacks continue and increased dramatically in July. An estimated 200,000 people civilians, insurgents and security forces have been killed since the violence began.

buglerbilly

15-10-11, 04:33 AM

US Sending Troops to Africa to Battle Insurgency

October 14, 2011

Associated Press|by Mark Smith

President Barack Obama said Friday he is dispatching roughly 100 U.S. troops to central Africa to help battle the Lord's Resistance Army, which the administration accuses of a campaign of murder, rape and kidnapping children that spans two decades.

In a letter to Congress, Obama said the troops will act as advisers in efforts to hunt down rebel leader Joseph Kony but will not engage in combat except in self-defense.

The White House said the first troops arrived in Uganda on Wednesday. Ultimately, they'll also deploy in South Sudan, the Central African Republic and Congo.

Long considered one of Africa's most brutal rebel groups, the Lord's Resistance Army began its attacks in Uganda more than 20 years ago but has been pushing westward.

The administration and human rights groups say its atrocities have left thousands dead and have put as many as 300,000 Africans to flight. They have charged the group with seizing children to bolster its ranks of soldiers and sometimes forcing them to become sex slaves.

Kony is wanted by the International Criminal Court under a 2005 warrant for crimes against humanity in his native Uganda.

Obama's announcement came in low-key fashion -- a letter to the leader of the House, Speaker John Boehner, in which he said the deployment "furthers U.S. national security interests and foreign policy and will be a significant contribution toward counter-LRA efforts in central Africa."

The deployment drew support from Sen. James Inhofe, a Republican who has visited the region.

"I have witnessed firsthand the devastation caused by the LRA, and this will help end Kony's heinous acts that have created a human rights crisis in Africa," he said in a statement. "I have been fervently involved in trying to prevent further abductions and murders of Ugandan children, and today's action offers hope that the end of the LRA is in sight."

But Obama's letter stressed the limited nature of the deployment.

"Our forces will provide information, advice and assistance to select partner nation forces," it said. "Although the U.S. forces are combat-equipped, they will ... not themselves engage LRA forces unless necessary for self-defense."

State Department officials portrayed the deployment as part of a larger strategy to combat the group that dates to the Bush administration but also includes legislation passed by Congress this year.

Victoria Nuland, a department spokeswoman, said the U.S. troops will aid in "pursuing the LRA and seeking to bring top commanders to justice." The broader effort includes encouraging rebel fighters to defect, disarm and return to their homes, she said.

The administration briefed human rights activists ahead of the announcement, and their officials were encouraged.

"These advisers can make a positive difference on the ground by keeping civilians safe and improving military operations to apprehend the LRA's top commanders," said Paul Ronan, director of the group Advocacy at Resolve.

© Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

buglerbilly

16-10-11, 03:22 PM

Kenyan troops enter Somalia to attack rebels

Kenyan troops have crossed the border into war-torn Somalia to attack Islamist Shebab rebels they accuse of being behind several recent kidnappings of foreigners.

Memebers of Scotland Yard visit the Kiwayu Safari village beach where Judith Tebbutt was kidnapped Photo: WILL WINTERCROSS

By Foreign Staff

12:49PM BST 16 Oct 2011

"We have crossed into Somalia in pursuit of the Shehab, who are responsible for the kidnappings and attacks on our country," government spokesman Alfred Matua said.

Reports from the border said large numbers of troops were on the move, while military planes and helicopters overhead.

Several witnesses reported heavy troop movement in Kenya's border regions, with truckloads of soldiers heading towards the frontier.

The assault comes a day after Kenya's Internal Security Minister George Saitoti branded Somalia's Al-Qaeda-inspired Shebab rebels "the enemy" and vowed to attack them "wherever they will be."

In just over the past month, a British woman and a French woman have been abducted from beach resorts in two separate incidents, dealing a major blow to Kenya's tourism industry.

On Thursday two female Spanish aid workers were seized from the Dadaab refugee camp, the world's largest and crowded with some 450,000 mainly Somali refugees.

Kenya already backs anti-Shebab and pro-government militia groups in Somali border regions as efforts to create a buffer zone from hostile rebels.

While Kenya has blamed the abductions on the Islamist Shebab, experts say the kidnappings could also be the work of pirates, bandits or opportunistic criminal gangs.

Somalia has had no effective government ever since it plunged into repeated rounds of civil wars beginning in 1991, allowing a flourishing of militia armies, extremist rebels and piracy.

buglerbilly

17-10-11, 05:09 AM

U.S. troops won’t fight, Ugandan president says

By Godfrey Olukya - The Associated Press

Posted : Sunday Oct 16, 2011 10:48:04 EDT

Stuart Price / AFP via Getty Images
A file photo taken in 2006 shows Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord's Resistance Army, answering journalists' questions in Ri-Kwamba, southern Sudan. President Obama is deploying 100 armed U.S. troops to Africa to assist local military forces against Kony's group.

KAMPALA, Uganda — Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni said Sunday that U.S. military “personnel” being sent to Uganda to help fight the rebel group the Lord’s Resistance Army will not participate in actual fighting.

Museveni told a news conference it was wrong to say that the U.S. was sending troops to fight the LRA and its brutal leader Joseph Kony.

“Better to call them U.S. personnel, not troops,” Museveni said.

The Americans will help gather intelligence, he said.

“When you call them troops you are saying that they are coming to fight on our behalf,” Museveni said. “We shall never have troops coming to fight for us. I cannot accept foreign troops to come and fight for me. We have the capacity to fight our wars.”

President Obama announced Friday he is dispatching about 100 U.S. troops — mostly special operations forces — to central Africa to advise in the fight against the LRA, a guerrilla group accused of widespread atrocities across several countries. Some experts suggest that the U.S. move is to reward Uganda for its contributions to the African Union force in Somalia that fights the al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab militia.

Museveni said Sunday that the U.S. has been supporting its fight against Kony already, including sharing satellite intelligence and assisting with helicopters.

The LRA once fought Ugandan troops in the country’s north, but have been flushed out of the country. The LRA now operates in South Sudan, Congo and the Central African Republic.

The LRA poses no known security threat to the United States, and a report from the anti-genocide group the Enough Project last year said that Kony no longer has complete and direct command and control over each LRA unit. The LRA is estimated to have between 200 and 400 fighters but still carries out deadly attacks on isolated villages.

The group’s tactics have been widely condemned as vicious. The U.S. troops will be helping to fight a group that has slaughtered thousands of civilians and routinely kidnaps children to be child soldiers and sex slaves.

Kony is wanted by the International Criminal Court for his group’s attacks.

buglerbilly

18-10-11, 01:44 AM

Army Builds First of New Brigades To Train Foreign Militaries

By Carlo Munoz

Published: October 17, 2011

Washington: The White House's decision to send U.S. troops to help the Ugandan military curb a violent separatist group had Washington buzzing last week.

Many inside the Beltway feared the mission, in which American special forces would support Ugandan forces in their war against the Lord's Resistance Army, could be a first step into a protracted conflict in Africa.

But advise and assist missions like the one in Uganda may become the new normal for the U.S. military, as the Pentagon tries to find a way maintain the military's global presence in the face of massive budget cuts.

These types of missions, by and large, are much cheaper to conduct compared to full-blown combat operations. They also allow U.S. forces to retain footholds in a number of global hot spots without sustaining and having to pay for a large force presence.

To that end, the Army is preparing to send out its first "regionally aligned brigade" to Africa Command in fiscal year 2013. That force, roughly the size of a brigade combat team, will be primarily tasked with training and assisting foreign militaries. It will be the first of several the Army hopes to create over the next few years. These brigades will be the first regular Army units designed to do partner nation engagements.

Advising foreign militaries has traditionally been the job of U.S. special operations forces. American special forces have worked with militaries all over the world on counterterrorism and counterinsurgency missions.

But with the growing demand for American-led military assistance missions, U.S. special operations forces are having trouble keeping up, a defense analyst with knowledge of these missions said.

U.S. special forces will still be responsible for the more intense military assistance missions, like the Uganda operation, that require the special skills they can bring to the table.

But other missions, such as basic military training and learning how to coordinate fire support with troop movements, can and should be done by regular Army soldiers, the analyst said.

Anticipated cuts to the Army's end strength, as a result of debt reduction measures called for by the White House, will definitely factor into how big a role the Army takes in training partner nation forces, the analyst added.

The Army is busy trying to figure out which military assistance missions will be done by special forces and which ones will be done by the regular Army, service officials involved with those talks told me at the U.S. Army Association's annual conference here last week.

However, those officials agreed that military assistance operations -- whether led by special forces or the Army -- will be a big part of what the U.S. military does in the future.

buglerbilly

18-10-11, 01:56 AM

Somali Islamists threaten to attack Kenya after military assault

Al-Shabab warns of 'flames of war' after Kenyan show of force follows kidnappings of tourists and aid workers

Xan Rice in Nairobi

guardian.co.uk, Monday 17 October 2011 18.48 BST

Al-Shebab spokesman Ali Mohamud Rage told reporters Kenya could expect violent retribution for the military assault in Solamia. Photograph: Stringer/AFP/Getty Images

Somali Islamist rebels warned they will bring the "flames of war" to Nairobi after Kenyan forces mounted a cross-border land and air assault over the weekend.

"We say to Kenya: did you consider the consequences of the invasion?" Sheikh Ali Mohamud Rage, spokesman for the al-Shabab militants, told reporters near Mogadishu. "We know fighting more than you and defeated other invaders. Your attack [on] us means your skyscrapers will be destroyed, your tourism will disappear. We shall inflict on you the same damage you inflicted on us."

In a rare show of force, dozens of Kenyan military vehicles, including tanks, crossed into Somalia on Sunday in an attempt to drive the militants away from the border. Together with pro-government Somalia forces they pushed more than 60 miles into Somalia, towards the town of Afmadow. No clashes have yet been reported, although five Kenyan airmen died when their helicopter crashed.

The Kenyan government has come under increasing pressure to control its border with Somalia after Somali gunmen carried out a string of kidnappings on its territory in recent weeks. Two women – one British, one French – were abducted in separate incidents on the coast, causing damage to Kenya's tourist industry.

Last week kidnappers captured two female Spanish aid workers in the Dadaab refugee camp, from where a Kenyan was taken in September. The identities of the kidnappers are unknown, but Somali criminal gangs and pirates have previously taken foreigners for ransom.

Al-Shabab militants have denied involvement, although the captives passed through territory under their control, and may still be there.

Speaking on Saturday, ahead of the incursion, Kenya's internal security minister, George Saitoti, said forces would pursue the rebels deeper into Somalia. "For the first time our country is threatened with the most serious level of terrorism," he said. Kenyan troops have made brief, low-key incursions into Somalia in recent years. However, security analysts say the latest operation is dangerous as Kenya has never before engaged in conflict outside its borders.

Given the huge territory that al-Shabab controls, it is unlikely that Kenya could defeat the rebels. A more likely intention is to send the Islamists a message and establish a buffer zone along the Kenyan border that would be controlled by friendly Somali forces, including thousands of government troops trained in Kenya. Holding territory will be difficult, however, since the al-Qaida-linked militants are skilled in guerrilla war, as was demonstrated after Ethiopia invaded Somalia in late 2006.

Roland Marchal, an expert in Africa at the Centre for International Studies and Research in Paris, said Kenya's decision could aid the rebels, who have given up most of their territory in Mogadishu in recent months.

"If I was Godane [the al-Shabab leader] I would send a letter of thanks to Kenya," he said. "Al-Shabab has been in crisis politically but this could stop the internal dissent, give them a clear enemy and generate fresh support from Somalis."

Until now, Somali rebels have focused their external threats on Burundi and Uganda, whose peacekeepers protect the government in Mogadishu.

Last July, suicide bombers recruited by al-Shabab killed 76 people in the Ugandan capital – an attack the rebel spokesman warned would be replicated in Kenya, but senior figures maintain what Marchal called a "gentlemen's agreement" with the Islamists, allowing the rebels to filter in and out of Kenya in exchange for holding off on attacks. Both sides profit from the illicit border trade in goods, especially sugar.

The weekend's military operation may signal the end of that understanding and heighten the risk of a terror strike in Kenya, according to Richard Cornwell, an independent security analyst in South Africa.

buglerbilly

19-10-11, 02:12 AM

Is The U.S. Racing to Stop a Rebel Assault in Africa?

By David Axe October 18, 2011 | 5:30 pm

The Pentagon could be in a race to prevent a major rebel attack on African civilians, aid groups believe. That’s one disturbing possibility behind President Barack Obama’s announcement of a new U.S. military mission to Central Africa.

On Friday, Obama informed Congress of the deployment of around 100 “combat-equipped” U.S. troops to help the Ugandan army track down rebel leader Joseph Kony and his cultish Lord’s Resistance Army, currently hiding out somewhere in South Sudan, northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo and southern Central African Republic. The first group of Americans is already on the ground in Uganda.

Obama’s announcement raised more questions than it answered. The U.S. has been quietly involved in the war on the LRA for several years, even helping the Ugandans plan a 2009 raid that missed Kony and sparked a bloody LRA reprisal. So why make such a big deal out of the latest effort? Could the new deployment represent the beginning of another U.S. “shadow war” waged by commandos and killer drones?

And why now? The LRA has been raping and pillaging across Central Africa for 20 years. What, besides a widely-ignored 2010 law, compelled Washington to try again to defeat the group?

Paul Ronan, from the aid group Resolve, explained one theory. Reports indicate that Kony’s top lieutenants, previously scattered across thousands of square miles of thick forest, recently came together for the first time in years, possible to plan a fresh assault on vulnerable communities. “We don’t know that this big gathering of LRA commanders will result in new attacks, but they’ve certainly used previous meetings to plan attacks on civilians in the past, so everyone is kind of holding their breath,” Ronan told Danger Room.

Resolve and a partner aid group, Invisible Children, have created an online tool called the LRA Crisis Tracker that allows anyone with Internet access to track LRA sightings.

“Multiple reports from former LRA abductees indicate that key members of the LRA command structure gathered in southeast Central African Republic between June and September of 2011,” Ronan said. The meeting reportedly included Dominic Ongwen, a former child soldier indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court.

“By late September an LRA group of 100 to 200 had split up and was heading into South Sudan and towards Congo, split between four and five groups,” Ronan added. What they’re up to, is anyone’s guess — but it can’t be good. And if their intentions include a large-scale assault on innocent civilians, it could explain why the Pentagon is in a hurry to intervene.

Photo: Army

buglerbilly

25-10-11, 11:50 PM

US Troops in the Fray in Africa

October 25, 2011

Military.com|by Phil Ewing

U.S. Army Special Forces troops will deploy into the field alongside central African forces on the hunt for a violent insurgent leader, a top Defense Department official confirmed Tuesday, but he stressed they'll only be along in a "support role."

Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs Alexander Vershbow told House lawmakers on Tuesday that most of the 100 SF troops will help with training and logistics at the headquarters level. He acknowledged, though, that some of them will deploy "at the platoon level" along with Ugandan, Congolese and other forces on the hunt for terrorist warlord Joseph Kony, the leader of a guerilla band called the Lord's Resistance Army.

Vershbow assured skeptical House Foreign Affairs Committee members that the Special Forces troops would be in central Africa only to help local troops, not for their own combat missions. But because some of them could go on operations in pursuit of the LRA, they'll need to be armed for their self-defense, and that meant President Barack Obama had to notify Congress of their deployment under the War Powers Resolution.

That distinction is why Obama sent a letter to Congress early in October alerting it of the Uganda mission, said Donald Yamamoto, principal deputy assistant secretary of State for African affairs, even though DoD sends hundreds of troops every year into foreign countries for training missions without such high-level notices. Congress already had passed laws urging the administration to take action against the LRA.

Still, lawmakers from both parties, led by Foreign Affairs Committee chairwoman Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Florida Republican, were skeptical. Over and over, they demanded to know the administration's "exit strategy," the cost of the operation, and whether Obama had obliged American forces to enter what would become an open-ended local war.

Virginia Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly asked what he called "a devil's advocate question": "There are lots of unpleasant people in the world, lots of terrorists and insurgents, but the U.S. can't afford to dethrone every one of them. What is our strategic interest here?"

Vershbow said that central Africa threatens to become an ungoverned space like Somalia. If the LRA continues to run amok it could destabilize all the countries in the region and they could succumb to insurgents or terrorists could carve out a safe haven, he said. This is what has happened in Somalia with the al Qaeda-affiliated group known as al Shabab, and the Obama administration fears could happen in Yemen. It is already what happened in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where weak central governments sheltered or ignored extremists within their borders.

Vershbow assured lawmakers them the U.S. Special Forces troops would be in central Africa for "months," not years; the mission would cost "tens of millions" of dollars, not "hundreds of millions;" and the goals were clear. If Ugandan or other troops capture or kill Kony and his top lieutenants, that's a win, he said. If American and local commanders judge after a few months that the U.S. troops have helped improve their ability to fight to they point they can carry on by themselves, the SF troops will come out, and the Africans will continue to pursue Kony on their own.

Kony and the LRA have forced tens of thousands of children to fight as child soldiers, and Yamamoto cited United Nations estimates that LRA violence has displaced some 385,000 people in central Africa. But Kony and his hardcore followers today only number about 200 people, officials say, which has enabled them to disappear into the open spaces among Uganda, the Congo, the Central African Republic and the new country of South Sudan.

"It's the open areas that make it terribly hard to track people," Yamamoto said. "That's his cover. That's how he's been able to escape for two decades without capture."

And that, the Obama administration says, is why the Ugandan and other militaries need American help. Specifically, the Army Special Forces troops will train local forces how to "fuse" the intelligence all of them get in order to act quicker and more effectively against the LRA.

There are non-military efforts as well. Part of the effort will come from American-backed assistance for communications in the region: Yamamoto said the U.S. Agency for International Development has been helping set up new cell phone and radio towers in the sparsely populated inter-border areas. Commanders want locals to call in reports about LRA activity and be able to get warnings if they're in the path of the guerillas.

New York Republican Rep. Robert Turner asked Vershbow whether the American SF troops or their African counterparts would be authorized to "take out the leadership" of the LRA "if they were seen and observed" using the unmanned Predator and other aircraft that have become a fixture in U.S. military operations.

Vershbow answered very carefully: "At the present time, the use of drones is not envisaged for this operation," he said. "Questions about the authorities for the use of drone strikes are probably not appropriate for commenting on in an open session like this."

Lawmakers did not press the issue, but the door apparently is not closed on the prospect that U.S. drones could play a future role in the central African operation.

© Copyright 2011 Military.com. All rights reserved

buglerbilly

04-12-11, 11:46 AM

Nigeria al Qaeda group bomb attack on banks kills three

Suspected Islamists on Sunday bombed two police buildings, two banks and killed three people, including a policeman and a soldier in the volatile northern Nigeria's Bauchi State.

Police officers armed with AK-47 rifles stand guard at sandbagged bunkers in Maiduguri, Nigeria Photo: AP

by Our Foreign Staff

10:21AM GMT 04 Dec 2011

The attacks by suspected members of the radical Boko Haram sect, which also seriously injured two other policemen, happened in the town of Azare and lasted four hours, they said.

The attackers armed with heavy machine guns, threw explosives and fired heavy machine guns into a regional police headquarters and an adjoining police station in the town, setting fire to the buildings, residents said.

"They came in a large convoy of cars armed with heavy machine guns and headed to the police area command office and bombed it along with the divisional police station attached to it," resident Usman Musa said.

"The attackers left behind a black banner hanging at the entrance of the police station with the arabic inscription of 'Allahu Akbar' (God is Great) which made people suspect they were Boko Haram," he said.

The attackers also bombed and robbed two banks in the town, 140 miles from the state capital Bauchi, residents said.

Musa, who was at the federal medical centre where victims from the attacks were taken said he saw the bodies of a soldier, a policeman and an errand boy for the police, while two policemen were being treated for gunshot wounds.

Another resident Garba Mohammed said two banks were bombed by the attackers who broke into the vaults.

"They emptied the banks' safes and made away with the money," said Mohammed, a dealer in second-hand clothes.

Mohammed said unexploded bomb canisters littered the banks' premises and policemen kept curious residents away while an anti-bomb squad worked to defuse the explosives.

Boko Haram has been blamed for scores of bomb and gun attacks in Nigeria in recent months, including Bauchi where four people were injured last month when a roadside bomb exploded in the city.

The sect staged a prison raid in September last year in Bauchi, freeing more than 700 inmates, and claimed to be behind bomb attacks on an open air beer garden at a military barracks on May 29 when President Goodluck Jonathan was sworn in.

The sect has also claimed responsibility for the August suicide bombing of the UN headquarters in Abuja which killed at least 24 people and coordinated attacks in the country's northeast on November 4 that left some 150 people dead.

buglerbilly

07-12-11, 12:54 AM

U.S. Troops Deploy in LRA Rebel Hunt: Ugandan Army

By MAX DELANY, Agence France-Presse

Published: 6 Dec 2011 12:55

ENTEBBE, Uganda - U.S. troops have begun a region-wide hunt for fighters from the Lord's Resistance Army, a Ugandan-born group that has been killing, raping and looting for years, the Ugandan army said Dec. 6.

U.S. President Barack Obama in October sent 100 special forces soldiers to help Uganda track down LRA chief and international fugitive Joseph Kony, who has wreaked havoc over four nations for more than two decades.

"They (U.S. troops) are there, and they are setting up their bases," said Ugandan army spokesman Felix Kulayigye.

U.S. troops had deployed to Obo in the Central African Republic and Nzara in South Sudan, where Uganda's army has forward bases to battle the rebel group, Kulayigye said. He gave no details of the numbers of troops sent.

Some of the U.S. troops staged a training exercise Dec. 6 with Ugandan air force crews in Entebbe, about 21 miles west of the capital, Kampala, on how to package supplies to be air dropped to front-line troops.

Previously, Uganda had to rely on supplies being ferried in by helicopter to specified landing sites but will now be able to be resupplied without having to return to base, Kulayigye said.

A U.S. official, speaking to AFP here on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the press, confirmed that some troops had arrived in affected areas but could not say where exactly the troops were located.

The rebels currently number several hundred, a fraction of their strength at their peak but still include a core of hardened fighters infamous for mutilating civilians and abducting children for soldiers and sex slaves.

The majority of U.S. troops will be based in Uganda while a smaller number will be based in jungle areas in neighboring countries to advise regional armies tracking the rebels, U.S. officials say.

The U.S. state department currently gives $17 million each year to cover the cost of transporting Ugandan forces to the conflict zone.

Tens of thousands of people have been killed since Kony took up arms in the late 1980s against the Ugandan government.

The International Criminal Court has a warrant against Kony, one of the continent's most wanted men.

Driven out of Uganda, the guerrillas have since scattered across a vast region of the Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan. They have recruited fighters from those nations over the years.

The LRA emerged from the frustrations of Uganda's marginalized Acholi ethnic group against the government, but its leaders have since dropped their national political agenda for the narrow objective of pillage and plunder.

buglerbilly

09-12-11, 03:10 AM

Al-Qaida offshoot hopes to turn Africa's Sahel region into a 'new Somalia'

AQIM terrorist bases across sub-Saharan strip pose a growing security threat to Africa and Europe, says panel of experts

Simon Tisdall

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 8 December 2011 19.02 GMT

The threat from al-Qaida in the Maghreb has been exacerbated after terrorists plundered advanced weapons from Libya during the fall of Gaddafi. Photograph: Sipa Press/Rex Features

An offshoot of al-Qaida is working to turn the whole of Africa's Sahel region into a "new Somalia" and terrorist bases there pose a growing threat to European and pan-African security, a panel of experts has warned.

Jerome Spinoza, head of the Africa bureau in the French ministry of defence, said the sub-Saharan Sahel area, up to 1,000km wide and stretching from the Atlantic in the west to the Red Sea in the east, presented challenges that western policymakers ignored at their peril.

"Instability is on the rise," Spinoza told the Chatham House thinktank in London on Thursday. "Without a meaningful policy, the area could constitute a lasting safe haven for jihadists."

Robert Fowler, a former UN special envoy to Niger and Canadian diplomat who was kidnapped and held hostage for four months in 2008-9 by al-Qaida in the Maghreb (AQIM), said the 31-strong group of captors was well-disciplined and wholly concentrated on its aim of creating an Islamic caliphate embracing the Muslim lands of Africa and the Middle East.

"These men are highly motivated and totally ascetic," Fowler said. "These guys have no needs. They are dressed in rags. They have a bag of rice and a belt of ammunition and that's it. I was held in 23 different locations in about 70 days. They are organised. They can break camp in under four minutes."

Fowler continued: "This was the most focused group of young men I have ever encountered in my life. They are totally committed to jihad. They said to me, 'We fight to die, you fight to go home to your wife and kids. Guess who will win?' Even if it takes 200 years … They want to turn the Sahel into a new Somalia."

Fowler said the terrorist threat to Europe's southern flank had risen after advanced weapons were plundered during the collapse of the Gaddafi regime in Libya. "They (AQIM) are now equipped with enormous amounts of Libyan weapons and I mean sophisticated weapons such as 20,000 [shoulder-mounted] SA-24 missiles, heavy mortars, heavy artillery and thousands of anti-tank mines … The UN has demanded they be handed over. Well, good luck with that."

The Sahel region embraces southern Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, southern Algeria, Niger, northern Nigeria, Chad, South Sudan and Darfur in western Sudan, northern Ethiopia and Eritrea.

Spinoza said a host of critical issues faced the region going beyond terrorism. They included recurring rebellions by nomadic Tuareg tribesmen, some of whom were armed by and fought as mercenaries for Gaddafi in this year's Libya conflict, cocaine trafficking to Europe from the west African coast, and people and arms smuggling.

The region was also confronted by rapid population growth, weak and ineffective governance, inter-state tensions, poor access to education and employment, and increasingly acute food supply problems exacerbated by climate change and the southward advance of the Sahara desert, he said.

AQIM was exploiting the resulting instability, he suggested, spreading its influence south from Algeria and raising the prospect of transcontinental link-ups with Boko Haram militant Islamists in Nigeria and al-Shabaab in Somalia.

Spinoza called for a joined-up approach by the international community, suggesting interested countries including France, the Netherlands and the US needed to coordinate their policies with regional and local players. "The EU's strategy for security involves development, rule of law and (non-military) security but the EU needs to be more concrete," he said.

Speaking this week, Kristalina Georgieva, the EU commissioner for humanitarian aid crisis response, said the Sahel was likely to experience severe food shortages next year because of erratic rainfall and localised dry spells.

Seven million people were already facing shortages in Niger, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Nigeria and Burkina Faso, she said. Current trends pointed to a massive problem of food availability next year.

The European commission last month increased humanitarian funding to the Sahel by €10m (£8.5m) to a total of €55m this year. Niger and Mauritania have already declared a crisis, prepared national action plans, and appealed for international help.

At the eastern end of the Sahel arc, 13 million people remained in need of emergency help and the crisis there was expected to last until the spring and perhaps the summer of 2012, Georgieva said.

buglerbilly

13-12-11, 01:56 PM

Is a U.S. military precedent being set in Africa?

By Walter Pincus, Tuesday, December 13, 7:52 AM

The United States has undertaken an “armed humanitarian mission” in sending 100 Special Forces troops into Central Africa to help the Ugandan army and other local forces capture or kill the leadership of the cultlike Lord’s Resistance Army.

That’s not my description. It was used Wednesday by William M. Bellamy, director of the National Defense University’s Africa Center and a former U.S. ambassador in Kenya. He also said there were “no good precedents” for what we are doing.

My thought on hearing “armed humanitarian mission” was: Would this be the precedent for military deployments in the post-Iraq, post-Afghanistan world?

Bellamy was speaking at a U.S. Institute of Peace (IOP) event about efforts to counter the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and its leader, Joseph Kony. For 25 years, Kony has terrorized a wide area of Central Africa where three countries come together. His group’s killing, looting and kidnapping of young boys and forcing them to fight have continued despite sporadic efforts to capture him by Uganda, Congo and the Central African Republic.

In all, the LRA has abducted 66,000 youth, some forced “to become child soldiers or sex slaves and ordered to commit unspeakable acts,” according to Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Johnnie Carson, who also spoke at the IOP event.

The United Nations has estimated that about 440,000 Africans have been displaced by LRA activities, and while the group’s leadership and core believers have been reduced to nearly 150, they still carried out 250 attacks this year, Carson said.

According to the Ugandan press, dozens of the U.S. Special Forces troops have established a frontline base in Obo, a town in southeastern Central African Republic, to help the regional armies track down Kony and other LRA leaders. The forward-based personnel are there to help with intelligence, communications and logistics operations. They are to fight only in self-defense.

Most people are unaware that President Obama’s Oct. 14 announcement of the Special Forces deployment was done in accordance with a bill that Congress passed in 2009 and was signed into law in 2010. It required the administration to plan and coordinate “diplomatic, economic, intelligence, and military elements of United States policy across the region regarding the Lord’s Resistance Army.”

In fact, the fiscal 2012 defense authorization bill now before Congress calls for providing “logistic support, supplies, and services and intelligence support” for Ugandan and other forces “participating in operations to mitigate and eliminate the threat posed by the Lord’s Resistance Army.” The legislation authorizes $35 million in 2012 and 2013 to cover the costs.

According to a Nov. 21 Congressional Research Service report, the Special Forces unit will cost an additional $4.5 million a month. That figure is on top of U.S. liaison officers from Africa Command dispatched in July 2011 to “to assist host government officials and military commanders who are working to counter the LRA,” the service wrote.

Kony is a bad person, but what’s the history of U.S. attempts to bring him down? In 2001, President George W. Bush placed the LRA on the U.S. Terrorist Exclusion List. In November 2008, in his last months in office, Bush sent fewer than 20 military advisers to support Operation Lightning and Thunder, an anti-LRA effort in Congolese territory carried out by U.S.-trained Ugandan army units and other regional forces.

“Leaky intelligence allowed the LRA leadership to get advance warning of the bombing raid that was supposed to begin the operation,” according to a recent report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. In response, the LRA attacked several Congolese villages, killing more than 400 people.

Since then the State Department has provided more than $41 million in non-lethal aid, such as satellite phones, night-vision goggles and pickup trucks. It also supplies fuel for “contract air support and fuel for [Ugandan army] helicopters,” according to the Congressional Research Service report. The Pentagon has also increased military assistance, providing $4.4 million in June for Ugandan military training along with combat engineer and communications equipment, according to the service.

Carson said the U.S. interest was a humanitarian one. The U.S. military should not be used just to protect American citizens or corporations or keep international waterways open, he told the IOP audience. But it should be used to respond to humanitarian crises as much as strategic ones. “That is what we stand for as a nation,” he said.

How far does the United States take this concept? Boko Haram, a Ni*ger*ian Islamist group, was the focus of a Nov. 30 report by the House Homeland Security’s subcommittee on counterterrorism and intelligence. The panel described the group as “an emerging threat to U.S. interests and the U.S. homeland.” Why? This northern Ni*ger*ia terrorist group has received praise and possibly advice and aid from al-Qaeda’s North African affiliate.

The House panel called for the United States to “work more closely with Ni*ger*ian security forces to develop greater intelligence collection and sharing with the U.S. intelligence community.”

The Obama administration’s 2011 national security strategy for countering terrorism in Africa calls for dismantling al-Qaeda elements and enabling countries “to serve as countervailing forces to the supporters of al-Qaeda and the purveyors of instability.”

Against this background it is worth looking at questions raised by the Congressional Research Service in its discussion of the U.S. Special Forces unit sent to help stop the LRA’s Kony: Is that response “commensurate with the level of threat the LRA poses to U.S. interests and whether the deployment of U.S. military personnel could lead to unintended consequences,” say, if one American is captured or killed? More broadly, the service went on, could this deployment “potentially be viewed as a precedent for U.S. responses in similar situations in the future?”

buglerbilly

14-12-11, 04:38 AM

Panetta: Djibouti Critical to US Terror Fight

December 13, 2011

Associated Press|by Lolita Baldor

CAMP LEMONIER, Djibouti - U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Tuesday that U.S. operations against al-Qaida are now concentrating on key groups in Yemen, Somalia and North Africa.

Panetta said efforts against the al-Qaida affiliates depend on American partnerships with countries like Djibouti. The military base in this tiny port nation in the Horn of Africa is the launch point for U.S. drones used for intelligence, surveillance and, at times, strikes against insurgents in terror hotspots.

Panetta told troops stationed at the base that he will visit Libya, becoming the first Pentagon chief to travel to the embattled country, which is emerging from an eight-month civil war.

He said he will also travel to Iraq in the coming days for a ceremony that will shut down the U.S. military mission there after nearly nine years at war.

As the U.S. winds down operations in Iraq and begins its methodical withdrawal from Afghanistan, the U.S. military has increasingly focused on Africa - particularly the north, where insurgents have found sanctuary.

"It's fair to say that the United States is intent on going after al-Qaida wherever they locate, and making sure they have no place to hide," said Panetta, who is making his first trip to Djibouti.

A key U.S. ally in this region, Djibouti has the only U.S. base in sub-Saharan Africa. It hosts the military's Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa.

U.S. officials have acknowledged that as the threat from core al-Qaida leaders in Pakistan declines - largely due to U.S. strikes that have killed insurgents or kept them on the run - affiliated groups in Africa and Yemen have taken on more active and dangerous roles.

The worry is that militant groups - including al-Shabab in Somalia and al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen - operate out of safe havens in undergoverned spaces.

"Our goal is to make sure that wherever they go, we go after them and make sure that they are not able to ever develop the kind of planning that would involve attacks on our homeland," Panetta told reporters traveling with him.

Militants based in Somalia and Yemen have been at the heart of a number of deadly terror attacks in the region, and several near-misses in the U.S.

The Somalia-based al-Shabab, which is linked to al-Qaida, unleashed twin bombings in Kampala, Uganda, that killed 76 in 2010. The group is particularly worrisome because it has recruited dozens of Somali-Americans, particularly young men, to travel to Somalia and take up the fight.

On Christmas Day 2009, a Nigerian man tried to blow up an airliner over Detroit during a flight that originated from Lagos, Nigeria.

U.S. and European officials also worry that al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb - which operates in the west and north of Africa - is working to establish links with al-Shabab and the Nigerian group Boko Haram.

Panetta met with Djibouti President Ismail Omar Guelleh as well as some of the roughly 3,000 U.S. troops that are based here, conducting counterterrorism, counter-piracy and humanitarian missions.

U.S. defense officials said Djibouti is planning to deploy some troops to the Somalia mission, joining forces from Uganda and Burundi who are working to push al-Shabab back, particularly from key areas around the capital region.

Panetta's plan to visit Libya comes amid ongoing violence there, including recent clashes between revolutionary fighters and national army troops near Tripoli's airport.

Panetta said Libya reflects the ongoing changes in the region after the Arab Spring, and said the U.S. wants to help Libyans move in the right direction as the people take back their country. With military assistance from the U.S. and NATO, Libyans ousted and later killed longtime leader Moammar Gadhafi earlier this year.

© Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

buglerbilly

14-12-11, 05:02 AM

Al-Shabaab in war of words with Kenyan army on Twitter

The Somali Islamist militant group with al-Qaida links has gained nearly 3,000 followers since it began tweeting last week

David Smith in Johannesburg

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 13 December 2011 15.26 GMT

Al-Shabaab members in Somalia. The militant group has posted on Twitter more than 80,000 times since setting up an account. Photograph: Feisal Omar/Reuters

Sifting through a mountain of unwelcome tweets, many Twitter users would sympathise with a lament such as: "Most comments are predictably ludicrous, irrational and uninspiring and, therefore, do not warrant the time for a response."

This peevish remark, however, came from an unusual source. Al-Shabaab, an Islamist militant group in Somalia, is running a Twitter account. Since launching less than a week ago, it has posted more than 80 times and attracted nearly 3,000 followers.

The move appears to demonstrate that, in the 21st century, no radical insurgency or martyrdom operation is complete without a social media platform run from California's Silicon Valley, even if Somalia is one of the world's poorest and most anarchic countries.

Al-Shabaab, which has links to al-Qaida, is fighting the weak, UN-backed Somali government and controls much of southern Somalia. It has run an increasingly sophisticated media operation in recent months, sending out press releases in well-written English with photos attached.

Its Twitter feed, @HSMPress, carries the self-description: "Harakat Al-Shabaab Al Mujahideen is an Islamic movement that governs South & Cen. Somalia & part of the global struggle towards the revival of Islamic Khilaafa."

The first tweet was a Qu'ranic phrase in Arabic, meaning: "In the name of God, the most gracious, the most merciful." Since then, its unknown author or authors have dispatched messages in fluent English. Several Americans, most of Somali descent, have joined the group in recent years.

On Tuesday, al-Shabaab was retweeting comments such as the "Somali telecom industry is booming with millions of subscribers" and "How can one lay down his arms when his enemies are grinding their swords to terminate him. No to negotiations undr invasion."

The page also gives al-Shabaab's point of view on the military conflict. One tweet said: "Update: Last night's attack on #Taabto lasted an hour & resulted in the deaths of 3 #KDF soldiers. An ammunition store was also set ablaze." It also linked to pictures of eight Burundian peacekeepers it said were killed in fighting in Mogadishu.

But Al-Shabaab has already allegedly exaggerated the numbers of wounded civilians and its military victories. On Saturday, it tweeted that Kenyan jets had bombed a Red Cross feeding centre in the town of Bardhere, with scores of women and children injured. A day later, the Red Cross confirmed its centre was hit, but said there were no casualties because it was empty at the time.

Most improbably, while their fighters wage war with bombs and bullets, al-Shabaab is locked in an online propaganda war with Kenya, using weapons of 140 characters each. Following Kenya's excursion into Somalia two months ago, the spokesmen for both sides are trading barbs and insults.

Kenya's army spokesman, major Emmanuel Chirchir, posts updates on the military state of play and has more than 10,000 followers. In one post he threatened to bomb concentrations of donkeys that might be moving weapons for the insurgents.

Al-Shabaab responded: "Your eccentric battle strategy has got animal rights groups quite concerned, Major."

On Monday, the Islamic insurgent group used Twitter to accuse Kenya of having a history of committing "barbarous acts" toward ethnic Somalis. They cited a 1984 massacre where human rights groups say troops killed about 3,000 ethnic Somali men in eastern Kenya.

Addressing more recent actions, al-Shabaab's tweets claimed Kenyan soldiers in Somalia "flee from confrontation & flinch in the face of death." They also suggested that Somali government soldiers need to sober up, claiming they were being intoxicated by the narcotic leaf, khat, which has been banned by al-Shabaab.

Chirchir returned fire with his own barrage of tweets. "With Al Shabaab joining tweeter [sic], lets take fight to their doorstep," he wrote.

He also accused al-Shabaab of stoning an innocent girl to death and chopping off hands. He noted that many commanders have banned bras in their territory, and urged readers to retweet the message in support of Somali women.

Hassan Omar Hassan, a Kenyan human rights activist, said the flurry of tweets obscures the paucity of information about actual operations by the Kenyan military since it entered Somalia in October. "To make an honest judgment about the war, Kenyans need more accuracy in war reporting," he told the Associated Press. "We don't know the full story … the government has been able to circumvent accountability."

buglerbilly

20-12-11, 01:03 AM

U.S. Special Forces Now in Central African Republic

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

Published: 19 Dec 2011 15:56

BANGUI, Central African Republic - U.S. Special Forces troops have set up a base in the Central African Republic as part of their regional hunt for fighters from the Ugandan-born Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) group, military sources said.

"The deployment of this contingent, the size of which is unknown, was carried out very discreetly with Ugandan military aircraft," a Central African military official said Dec. 19 on condition of anonymity.

The U.S. troops set up a base in Obo and are expected to coordinate their efforts with local government forces and Ugandan soldiers.

U.S. President Barack Obama in October announced he was sending 100 Special Forces troops to Kampala, Uganda, to help Uganda track down LRA chief and international fugitive Joseph Kony, who has wreaked havoc over four nations for more than two decades.

Besides Obo, the U.S. forces also have a forward base in South Sudan. They began deploying in Uganda earlier this month.

The rebels currently number several hundred, a fraction of their strength at their peak but still include a core of hardened fighters infamous for mutilating civilians and abducting children for troops and sex-slaves.

The majority of U.S. troops will be based in Uganda while a smaller number will be based in jungle areas in neighboring countries to advise regional armies tracking the rebels, US officials say.

Tens of thousands of people have been killed since Kony took up arms in the late 1980s, initially against the Ugandan government.

The International Criminal Court has a warrant against Kony, one of the continent's most wanted men.

Driven out of Uganda, the guerrillas have since scattered across a vast region of the Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan, recruiting fighters from those nations over the years.

The LRA emerged from the frustrations of Uganda's marginalized Acholi ethnic group against the government, but its leaders have since dropped their national political agenda for the narrow objective of pillage and plunder.

buglerbilly

21-12-11, 05:03 AM

Boko Haram suspects held after Nigerian shootout

Bomb-making equipment seized in Kano after gun battle between police and suspected militants leaves seven dead

David Smith in Johannesburg

guardian.co.uk, Monday 19 December 2011 16.49 GMT

A burnt Nigerian police truck after a Boko Haram attack in Damaturu last month. Photograph: Pius Utomi Ekpei/AFP/Getty Images

Nigerian police say they have captured 14 suspected Islamist militants and seized bomb-making equipment after a gun battle that left seven people dead.

The arrests signify a blow to Boko Haram, a radical sect that has stepped up a bloody insurgency in Nigeria this year, although its resilience is proven and its overall size opaque.

The shootout began when police watching the house of a suspected militant in the northern city of Kano were attacked, the local police commissioner Ibrahim Idris said.

"One of the suspects, Mohammed Aliyu, noticed that his house was being monitored and mobilised some members of his syndicate," Idris said. "They drove up in three vehicles and attacked the policemen and shot [three] of them dead."

Four police officers were wounded, he added. "Four of the syndicate members were shot dead by the police special anti-robbery squad that responded to the scene."

Some reports suggested a leader of Boko Haram was among those arrested, but a source close to the group denied this.

At the suspect's house police found 50 litres of petrol and five gas canisters, AK-47 rifles, two pump-action shotguns and 1,125 rounds of ammunition, Reuters reported.

Another suspect's house was found to contain detonators, wires, homemade bomb casings and large quantities of explosives, including gunpowder and ammonium nitrate.

Boko Haram, dubbed the Nigerian Taliban and blamed for scores of shootings and bombings in northern Nigeria, has eclipsed the oil-rich Niger delta as the country's primary security headache.

This year it struck twice in the capital, Abuja, including a suicide car bomb attack on the UN headquarters that killed 26 people. Last month it claimed responsibility for an attack in Damaturu that left at least 65 dead, its deadliest strike to date.

There were further attacks last week, mostly targeting security forces. On Thursday militants attacked Kano's air force secondary school, killing three air force officers and badly wounding a fourth. On Friday, a police officer on patrol was shot dead in Kano city.

On Saturday, a bomb blast in a residential compound in Maiduguri killed at least one person and seriously wounded four others. Further west, in northern Kano state, gunmen opened fire on a police checkpoint in the village of Gaida, killing one police officer and wounding another, who was taken to hospital.

Also on Saturday a bomb-making factory was discovered at a house in Maiduguri, apparently after an accidental explosion there. Lieutenant Colonel Mohammed Hassan, a spokesman for the joint military task force for Borno state, said: "A major factory for the production of improvised explosive devices, large quantities of unused IED materials, AK-47 rifles, ammunition and other vital items have been discovered."

Boko Haram, usually translated as "western education is forbidden/sinful", first came to prominence in 2009 after hundreds of its followers were killed when they attacked police stations in Maiduguri.

Despite counter-insurgency training from the US military, security forces are struggling to contain the growing threat. In some instances their heavy-handedness is said to have radicalised the mostly poor, unemployed youths targeted for recruitment by Boko Haram.

Rumours persist that Boko Haram is receiving help from abroad, possibly from al-Qaida, and copying tactics such as suicide bombings.

Shehu Sani, president of the Civil Rights Congress of Nigeria, who claims he has tried to broker a ceasefire, said: "It is possible they have a link. In the last meeting we had, some of them openly confided that members are spread around Cameroon, Chad and Niger and in contact with other like-minded groups."

Boko Haram has called for Nigeria to impose strict Islamic law on the country's 160 million people, who are roughly evenly split between Christians and Muslims. But it is now believed to be made up of several factions with various demands, which could make negotiating an amnesty even more difficult.

Speaking from Abuja, Antony Goldman, a west Africa analyst at London-based PM Consulting, said: "Who do you talk to? The ones who say we're fed up with corruption in Borno or the ones who want an Islamic state in the north or the whole of Nigeria?

"Like other Islamic groups, it doesn't have a rigid command structure. Different things happen under the same name, and not always for the same reason."

buglerbilly

24-12-11, 03:30 PM

DECEMBER 24, 2011, 7:14 A.M. ET.

Nigerian Violence Kills 61

Associated Press

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria-At least 61 people have been killed during several days of fighting in northeast Nigeria between security forces and a radical Muslim sect responsible for a series of increasingly bloody attacks in Africa's most populous nation, authorities said Saturday.

The fighting between suspected members of the sect known as Boko Haram and a joint task force of police and military began Thursday in Borno and Yobe states in Nigeria's arid northeast corner bordering Cameroon, Chad and Niger. The fighting left residents cowering in their homes amid gunfire and explosions.

At least 50 people have died in Damaturu and Potiskum in Yobe state during the fighting, local police commissioner Lawan Tanko told The Associated Press on Saturday. In Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state, a mortuary official who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter told the AP at least 11 bodies had been brought in from the fighting.

The violence left at least two senior police officers dead in Yobe state, while a military spokesman in Borno said that three churches had been bombed during attacks there.

In Yobe state, the fighting became so intense that the military ordered those living in a neighborhood surrounding Damaturu's central mosque to evacuate. After a deadline, soldiers riding in armored personnel carriers and tanks drove into the neighborhood shooting, Tanko said.

``We were able to kill 12 of the Boko Haram armed sect and bombers,'' Tanko said. The police commissioner said officers also recovered Kalashnikov rifles, ammunition and explosives.

Boko Haram has launched a series of bombings against Nigeria's weak central government over the last year in its campaign to implement strict Shariah law across the nation of more than 160 million people home to both Christians and Muslims.

Boko Haram claimed responsibility for a Nov. 4 attack on Damaturu, Yobe state's capital, that killed more than 100 people. The group also claimed the Aug. 24 suicide car bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Nigeria's capital that killed 24 people and wounded 116 others.

Little is known about the sources of Boko Haram's support, though its members recently began carrying out a wave of bank robberies in the north. Police stations also have been bombed and officers killed.

Boko Haram has splintered into three factions, with one wing increasingly willing to kill as it maintains contact with terror groups in North Africa and Somalia, diplomats and security sources say.

The sect is responsible for more than 450 killings in Nigeria this year alone, according to an AP count.

buglerbilly

25-12-11, 12:44 PM

Christmas blast at Nigerian church

December 26, 2011 - 9:00PM

A deadly explosion hit a church near the Nigerian capital Abuja on Christmas morning, with rescuers rushing to provide ambulances and the number of casualties unclear.

The area around the scene of the blast degenerated into chaos after the blast, with angry youths starting fires and threatening to attack a nearby police station.

Police shot into the air to disperse them and closed a major highway.

"There are dead people," National Emergency Management Agency spokesman Yushau Shuaib said. An AFP correspondent saw a dead body being loaded into an ambulance.

The blast went off at the St Theresa Church in Madalla outside the capital Abuja.

Shuaib could not say how many people were inside the church at the time. His agency called for ambulances to evacuate victims and said the area had been cordoned off.

Police also confirmed the explosion but could not immediately provide details.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility, although Nigeria has been rocked by scores of bomb blasts and shootings attributed to Islamist group Boko Haram.

The group claimed responsibility for the August suicide bombing of UN headquarters in Abuja that killed at least 24 people. There have been a number of attacks in Suleija area, also outside Abuja.

A string of bomb blasts in the central city of Jos on Christmas Eve 2010 were claimed by Boko Haram.

In recent days in three cities in the northeast, where most of the violence attributed to Boko Haram has occurred, attacks blamed on the sect followed by a heavy military crackdown killed up to 100 people, authorities and a rights group have said.

The chief of army staff, Lt-Gen Azubuike Ihejirika, was quoted by local media as saying soldiers killed 59 Boko Haram members in the northeastern city of Damaturu. Shootouts had taken place on Thursday and Friday.

Others said the total death toll on all sides - authorities, extremists and civilians - could be as high as 100.

A purported spokesman for Boko Haram claimed responsibility for the initial violence in the three northeastern cities, saying they were revenge for a brutal military assault against the sect in 2009.

Violence blamed on the sect has steadily worsened in recent months, with bomb blasts becoming more frequent and increasingly sophisticated and death tolls climbing.

The attacks have continued despite well publicised raids on so-called bomb factories and arrests of a number of alleged Boko Haram members by authorities.

There has been intense speculation over whether Boko Haram has formed links with outside extremist groups, including al-Qaeda's north African branch.

The group is believed to have a number of factions with varying aims.

It launched an uprising in 2009 that was put down by a brutal military assault which left some 800 dead as well as its mosque and headquarters in the northeastern city of Maiduguri in ruins.

It went dormant for about a year before re-emerging in 2010 with a series of assassinations.

AFP

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/christmas-blast-at-nigerian-church-20111225-1p9n1.html#ixzz1hXuVWNZ4

buglerbilly

25-12-11, 02:44 PM

Oil interests push China into Sudanese mire

By Andrew Higgins, Sunday, December 25, 8:49 AM

JUBA, South Sudan — At a restaurant along the River Nile offering crocodile and ostrich meat, officials of the world’s newest — and desperately destitute — nation hosted a lunch this month for Liu Guijin, China’s visiting envoy for African affairs.

Liu’s visit to Juba, the dirt-track capital of South Sudan, which split from Sudan in July, came at a tense time: Sudan had just bombed a refugee camp, armed militias were mining roads, and troops were clashing in disputed border areas.

The Chinese envoy, however, came here mainly to talk about oil.

The Chinese “are very worried,” said Stephen Dhieu Dau, South Sudan’s minister of petroleum and mining, who attended the lunch with Liu. “Their wish is to see the continuation of production and the flow of the crude. This is their concern.”

China, which gets nearly a third of its imported crude oil from Africa, has invested billions of dollars in the past 15 years to pump crude from this war-scarred land. But the division of what until five months ago was a united country has pushed Beijing into a political minefield in defense of its assets, straining China’s “just business” insistence that it doesn’t get involved in the internal affairs of foreign lands.

China’s involvement revolves largely around the interests of a single company, the China National Petroleum Corp., or CNPC, a state-owned giant that, in its quest to match the global reach of Western oil majors and to feed China’s appetite for fuel, has dragged usually risk-averse Chinese diplomats into one of Africa’s most poisonous feuds.

Across Africa, China is getting tugged into local affairs. In Zambia, China’s involvement in mining — and its close ties to the incumbent president — dominated a September presidential election. China’s man lost. A multibillion-dollar, energy-linked Chinese loan to Ghana caused political ructions there. Leaders in Chad, meanwhile, have been struggling in recent weeks to tamp down public anger over a sudden boost in the price of gasoline produced by a new CNPC refinery near the Chadian capital.

China’s entanglement in foreign nations’ quarrels, however, is perhaps deepest in the desert and bush that flank the Nile. Here, CNPC straddles both sides of a murderously volatile fault line: between Muslim Arabs in the north and black, often Christian Africans who inhabit the south.

Most of the oil lies in the landlocked south, but the only way to get it to market is through Chinese-built pipelines that pass through the north to a Chinese-built terminal on the Red Sea.

When CNPC first took a stake in oil fields here in 1996, China placed all its chips on a brutal regime in Khartoum, selling arms and providing diplomatic cover as President Omar Hassan al-Bashir battled to crush southern rebels. With these same rebels now running ministries in Juba, China is rushing to hedge its bets, offering Khartoum’s foes in the south a package of development aid and low-interest credit that hasn’t been announced but that officials here say could be worth as much as $10 billion.

“During the struggle of the people of South Sudan, China took the side of the government in Khartoum,” said Pagan Amum, the secretary-general of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, or SPLM, a rebel outfit during the civil war that is now South Sudan’s ruling party. “But that is history, a troubled history, and we will not allow ourselves to be hostages of the past.”

Amum, who got invited to China last month, said that he raised this “difficult past” during a banquet in Beijing at the corporate headquarters of CNPC and that he was assured that the company wants to “sort things out, to heal” and work closely with Juba.

Pursuit of energy

In the vanguard of China’s pursuit of energy and profit overseas, CNPC began looking abroad nearly two decades ago, just as Chinese industry’s appetite for oil started to overtake domestic production. Since then the company has invested in ventures from Peru and Venezuela to Iraq and Kazakhstan.

But nowhere has CNPC poured in so much money and caused itself — and the Chinese government — so many headaches as in Sudan.

China imported more than half the oil it consumed last year, with Africa its biggest source after the Middle East. The country’s largest African supplier by far was Angola, but most of that oil was simply purchased, not produced, by Chinese companies. In the Sudan region, by contrast, CNPC — the dominant partner in foreign consortiums operating there — actually pumped the oil from the ground.

Chinese customs figures show that China imported 92 million barrels of crude from Sudan last year — or 70 percent of Sudan’s total oil exports as reported by the then united country’s Central Bank.

CNPC, thanks in part to its expansion overseas, now ranks as one of the world’s biggest energy companies. Its listed subsidiary, PetroChina, which trades on the New York Stock Exchange, has a market capitalization just behind that of ExxonMobil, America’s biggest oil company.

Though largely motivated by profit, CNPC won strong state support for its push into Sudan by presenting this and other investments abroad as a boost to China’s energy security: They reduce China’s dependence on Western oil majors that dominate production in Angola, Nigeria and elsewhere. But they’ve also left Beijing struggling to juggle often-irreconcilable interests.

“They want to be close to us and close to Khartoum. But Jesus said you cannot serve two masters,” said Dau, South Sudan’s petroleum minister. “They have to make a choice. They have to be honest and say who is right. That is what the Bible says.”

China has tried to stay neutral but gets sniped at by both sides. “It’s a dilemma for China,” said Cui Shoujun, director of the International Energy Research Center at Renmin University in Beijing. China “tries to balance the south and the north but hasn’t come up with an effective way to do this.”

Amid escalating tension across a new international border, Amum, the head of South Sudan’s ruling party, traveled to the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, last month for talks with officials from Khartoum on pipeline tariffs and other issues. The African Union mediated the negotiations, but China played an active role behind the scenes trying to calm tempers.

When discussions broke down and Sudan threatened to disrupt pipeline deliveries, Amum got a call on his cellphone from China’s ambassador in Juba. The ambassador, Amum said, “is very powerful” and wanted to ensure that oil keeps flowing.

“We talked about threats to our national interest and their national interests,” Amum said.

The Chinese Embassy declined to comment. The Foreign Ministry in Beijing then issued a stern public warning that “China thinks it is crucially important . . . to keep normal oil production.”

Sudan, though a close friend of Beijing for years, still held up China-destined oil shipments for several days. Liu, China’s Africa envoy, rushed to Juba and then Khartoum, warning that oil has to keep flowing “because the consequences of stopping . . . will be disastrous to everyone.” Oil tankers are now being loaded normally again, but the underlying dispute is far from solved.

As the talks with Khartoum collapsed, South Sudan’s Petroleum Ministry summoned CNPC and its partners from Malaysia and India to a shabby hotel conference room in Juba to confront another nettlesome issue: the rewriting of oil contracts.

The ministry says it doesn’t want the companies to suffer financially but does want them to pay attention to matters that the old, Khartoum-drafted contracts largely ignored: protection of the environment, respect for human rights and social responsibility. CNPC officials in Juba, citing the sensitivity of the talks, declined to comment.

Western firms retreat

The deals South Sudan wants reworked date to when CNPC first plunged into Sudan, taking over fields originally developed by the U.S. company Chevron, which, alarmed by mounting violence, had pulled out. Shortly after this, Washington in 1997 imposed economic sanctions on Sudan, which it declared as a “sponsor of terrorism and a relentless oppressor of its minority Christian population.”

As Western companies retreated, CNPC advanced, boosting production and investing in a pipeline to the Red Sea that, in 1999, allowed the first oil exports from Sudan.

Stories spread of atrocities linked to CNPC’s oil wells, including accounts of Chinese-supplied helicopters gunning down villagers as the Sudanese military moved in to clear and secure oil-producing areas. Not all of the accounts were true, but CNPC, steeped in the secretive ways of China’s ruling Communist Party, which appoints the company’s boss, mostly ignored pleas from outsiders for information and access.

By the time Sudan and southern rebels signed a peace accord in 2005 to end Africa’s longest civil war, “China was the devil in the minds of many people here,” said Alfred Sebit Lokuji, an expert in local development at Juba University.

China also came under withering fire from Western human rights activists, who accused it of complicity in Khartoum’s depredations in the western Darfur region and in the south. They called on investors to boycott PetroChina, CNPC’s listed subsidiary, and dubbed the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing “the genocide games.”

When the International Criminal Court in The Hague indicted Bashir on war-crimes charges in Darfur in 2009, Zhou Yongkang, a member of the Communist Party’s Politburo Standing Committee and a former CNPC boss who had led the company’s 1990s expansion into Sudan, visited Khartoum to attend the opening of a Chinese-built refinery. He declared himself an “old friend of the Sudanese president.”

Amum, the SPLM secretary-general, said he was assured by CNPC’s boss, Jiang Jiemin, during his trip to Beijing that “if anything bad happened, it was not from them but from the government of Sudan. They said they were not involved in human rights violations.” CNPC in Beijing declined to comment.

China shifts gears

As independence for South Sudan became increasingly likely, China shifted gears, opening a diplomatic mission in Juba and reaching out to the SPLM. CNPC also set about mending fences, funding a computer center at Juba University. When Sudan split in July, the oil company began moving staff members from Khartoum to Juba, setting up offices, a dormitory and a canteen in a cluster of prefabricated huts at a Chinese-run hotel. China’s embassy is in the same compound.

Newly relocated CNPC staff members are shocked by Juba’s primitive conditions. A poster on their office wall warns of “Five Major Hazards” — a list of diseases endemic in South Sudan. But, one staffer noted, at “least they sell beer,” unlike in Khartoum, where alcohol is banned.

South Sudan, which gets 98 percent of its revenue from oil pumped by CNPC-led foreign operators, has tried to woo Chevron, Halliburton and other U.S. oil companies but found no takers, leaving China as its only real economic partner.

“Reality makes us work with people who are not our friends,” said Lual Deng, a southerner who served in Khartoum as petroleum minister before the country split. “We would prefer Western companies, but they are not coming.”

China’s money hasn’t opened all doors. Nihal Bor, the chief editor of the Citizen, a local newspaper, recalled how a Chinese diplomat stopped by ahead of an August visit to Juba by Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi and offered to pay for the publication of “an interview” with Yang trumpeting Beijing’s friendship. But there was a snag: The paper would not get to see the minister, only to publish an embassy-scripted “interview” in return for cash. “We are not that desperate,” said the editor, who declined the offer.

Amum, the ruling party’s head, though, thinks China’s deep pockets offer the best hope for development in a country bigger than France but with only a few dozen miles of paved roads. China, he says, can help not just the oil industry, but also mining, agriculture and infrastructure. “There are no hard feelings,” Amum said. He has learned how to use chopsticks.

buglerbilly

08-01-12, 03:03 AM

Church attacks in Nigeria leave at least 27 worshippers dead

Islamist group claims responsibility amid growing concern about government's inability to tackle sectarian violence

Tracy McVeigh

guardian.co.uk, Saturday 7 January 2012 20.00 GMT

Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan has declared a state of emergency amid claims he is failing to tackle the escalating bloodshed. Photograph: Pius Utomi Ekpei/AFP/Getty Images

A fresh wave of violence against churchgoers in Nigeria has left at least 27 people dead and heightened fears over security in Africa's most populous country.

The religiously motivated massacres, three in as many days since Thursday, targeted Christians in Mubi and Gombe, both towns in the north-east where a state of emergency was declared by President Goodluck Jonathan last week. Some 17 other deaths have been reported in other regions.

There is growing concern that the government's inability to tackle the rising levels of sectarian violence, blamed on radical Islamic group Boko Haram, may result in hundreds of people fleeing their homes. The group is now carrying out weekly attacks on churches and police stations in northern and central areas. Islamic clerics who speak out against the violence have been assassinated.

Last year saw an upsurge in Boko Haram's bloody activities, with some 550 people killed, culminating in a co-ordinated bombing campaign on Christmas Day across Nigeria which left 39 dead and dozens wounded, including at a church near the capital, Abuja.

The Gombe attack took place during a church service on Thursday, leaving six worshippers dead, while on Friday gunmen opened fire on Christians gathered in Mubi to mourn the deaths of three people killed the previous night.

A Red Cross official told Reuters: "On Friday, as people gathered to mourn the deaths, the gunmen, believed to be the same attackers, killed 18 people, totalling 21."

The Mubi shooting came as Boko Haram members attacked a beauty salon and fought government forces in other regions on Friday night.

"Three gunmen with their faces covered with black cloth burst into my salon and started shooting at customers, chanting, 'God is great, God is great,'" said Stephen Tizhe, 35.

On the same night a Christian couple were shot dead in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state and the focus of Boko Haram's violence over the past 18 months. Mubi is in Adamawa state, just south of Borno, where Boko Haram was formed in 2002 to promote a form of Islam which makes it "haram", or forbidden, for Muslims to take part in any political or social activity associated with western society, including non-Islamic education, voting in elections and wearing shirts and trousers.

The group, suspected of having support from outside Nigeria, was blamed for the country's first suicide bomb attack last August, which left 24 people dead at a UN compound.

The Red Cross official said members of the predominantly Christian Igbo community were fleeing the north-east. A Nigerian newspaper published a warning from Boko Haram last week that Christians had three days to leave majority-Muslim areas or be killed.

In a statement on Friday to the Daily Trust newspaper in Nigeria's north, a Boko Haram spokesman, using the name Abul Qaqa, claimed responsibility for the attacks in Gombe and Mubi.

"We want to prove to the federal government of Nigeria that we can always change our tactics," the spokesman said.

buglerbilly

10-01-12, 05:02 AM

Ugandan Air Force Personnel Get Raven Training

Posted on January 9, 2012 by The Editor

Eight members of the Uganda Air Force received training on the Raven in December. The Uganda defense forces purchased four of the systems in July for $3 million, according to logistics management specialist Cindy Vanburg of AMCOM’s Security Assistance Management Directorate.

The Uganda service members, in two groups of four, received instruction on their country’s new systems, which would be delivered in January after the training. The instructors were from Rally Point Management, out of Fort Walton Beach, Florida.

“I like it,” Private Ronald Mudhasi said of the Raven. “It’s interesting, very interesting.”   ”It’s good,” Capt. Patrick Kubayo said. “It’s a good … support of our operations in Somalia. Very necessary. The instructors they’re professional. They know what they’re doing. They help us a lot.”   Said Lance Cpl. Rowland Jimmy Odoch, “It is good. It will help us in our service in Uganda and other countries.”

Using a laptop computer with stylus, Rally Point Management instructor Mike Mahowald taught the Ugandans how to control the aircraft. “Every click is 20 feet up or 20 feet down,” he said at one point.   The Raven flew overhead with the Ugandans at the controls when a few visitors prepared to leave.

Rally Point Management site head Kurt Donaldson was asked how the Ugandans were doing.   ”They’re doing good,” Donaldson replied. “They’re doing very good.”

Source: Redstone Rocket

buglerbilly

11-01-12, 02:52 AM

Boko Haram kill eight as Nigerian beer parlour is targeted

Gunmen from the radical Islamist sect Boko Haram killed eight people, including four police officers, after opening fire at a beer parlour in northeast Nigeria.

12:30AM GMT 11 Jan 2012

The shootings come as the sect has promised to target Christians in Nigeria's Muslim north, expanding its campaign of assassinations and bombings.

Tuesday night's attack occurred in the town of Potiskum in Yobe state. Local police commissioner Tanko Lawan said the six gunmen began shooting as patrons drank beer, which the local Shariah law technically opposes, though bars remain open for those living there.

"We didn't confront the gunmen at the beer parlour," Lawan said. "Any police that goes there went on his own."

In a separate attack on Tuesday, gunmen killed three people in Dalman, a Christian village in northern Nigerian Bauchi state.

Boko Haram, whose name means "Western education is sacrilege" in the local Hausa language, is blamed for at least 510 killings last year alone, according to an AP count. In a recent attack, it killed 20 Christian Igbo traders holding a meeting in Nigeria's northeast.

The group also claimed credit for attacks that killed at least 42 people in Christmas Day strikes that included the bombing of a Catholic church near Abuja. The group also claimed an August suicide car bombing that targeted the U.N. headquarters in the capital, killing 25 people and wounding more than 100.

Nigeria's central government has been slow to respond to the sect. On Dec. 31, President Goodluck Jonathan declared regions of Borno, Niger, Plateau and Yobe states to be under a state of emergency, meaning authorities can make arrests without proof and conduct searches without warrants. He also ordered international borders near Borno and Yobe state to be closed.

However, the attacks have not stopped.

Boko Haram's promises to target Christians in Nigeria's north have sparked fears and led some Christians to flee the area. There also has been retaliatory violence in Nigeria's Christian south, including an attack Tuesday on a mosque and a Koran school in Benin City that killed at least five people.

buglerbilly

20-01-12, 03:13 PM

Friday, January 20, 2012, 10:11 AM

Tuareg fighters mercenaries of the former army of Gaddafi attacked Mali military camps.

Well, they got away with lots of Small Arms, mortars and RPG's from Libya if rumours are to be believed. Raiding Mali towns is just a continuation of what they've been doing for years in any case..................

At least 45 rebels and two government soldiers have died this week during fighting in nothern Mali, the country's military said. The battles ended several years of fragile peace in the country's northern desert, which borders Algeria and Mauritania, and appeared to confirm the Malian government's fear that nomadic Tuareg fighters once employed by the regime of ousted Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi had returned.

Nomadic Tuareg rebels are ready to flush out the Malian army in several northern towns.

"Our armed forces have bravely beaten back the attacks of the former Libyan fighters and the MNLA (National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad) rebels," the armed forces said in a statement on state media on Thursday, using the acronym of the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad.

But Moussa Ag Acharatoumane, a spokesman for the rebels, denied the government's account, telling the Reuters news agency that his fighters had killed around 30 to 40 soldiers.

The MNLA says it is fighting for independence for the traditional Tuareg homeland of Azawad, in the Sahara.

The MNLA launched an offensive to seize several northern towns, including Tessalit and Aguelhok. Both rebel and government forces claim to be in control of Aguelhoc. The MNLA spokesman said fighting was suspended in Tessalit to allow for the withdrawal of Algerian soldiers who had been helping Mali.

Fighting erupted in Aguelhoc and Tessalit on Wednesday morning, keeping residents indoors as gunfire was exchanged, a day after the army said it had fought off an attack in the town of Menaka by bombing rebel positions.

The return of the Tuareg fighters from Libya is the "nightmare scenario that regional leaders have been worrying and warning about ever since the fall of Gaddafi in Libya", said Al Jazeera's May Welsh reporting from neighbouring Niger.

"Lieutenant Oumar Toure, an army officer, said the military "would not allow anyone to meddle with Mali's sovereignty".

"The instructions are clear: Don't hurt civilians, but use all your energy to hunt down the criminals," he said.

Local government officials in Tessalit and Aguelhoc reported heavy weapons fire on Wednesday as the rebels attacked military camps in the two locations.

buglerbilly

21-01-12, 05:50 AM

Nigerian city of Kano rocked by explosions and gunfire

Eyewitnesses describe panic and pandemonium on streets as residents ran for cover and smoke rose into sky

David Smith in Johannesburg

The Guardian, Saturday 21 January 2012

People watch as smoke rises from the police headquarters in the north Nigerian city of Kano after it was hit by a blast. Photograph: Reuters

At least seven people were killed as explosions and gunfire rocked the biggest city in Nigeria's mainly Muslim north after Friday prayers yesterday. The radical Islamist sect Boko Haram has claimed responsibility for the attacks.

Witnesses described panic and pandemonium on the streets of Kano as residents ran for cover and plumes of smoke rose into the sky.

One explosion ripped through the city's police headquarters soon after 5pm, causing an unknown number of casualties.

Police kept reporters away from the building, which had its roof torn off and windows blown out by the explosion.

Witnesses said a bomber had pulled up to the building on a motorbike before getting off and running at it, holding a bag. "We tried to stop him, but he ran in forcefully with his bag," said a policeman at the scene. "All of a sudden there was a blast. You can see for yourself the building is damaged."

An Associated Press reporter said the explosion had been powerful enough to shake his car, which was several miles away.

Two other police stations and an immigration office in Kano, Nigeria's second-biggest city, were also hit, according to a BBC report. The explosions were followed by the sound of gunshots.

Officials could not be immediately reached for comment to say what had caused the blast or whether there had been any injuries. A spokesman for the Nigeria immigration service in the capital, Abuja, said officials in Kano had told him the blast shook their nearby office and was caused by a bomb.

Secondhand accounts quickly emerged on Twitter. Alkasim Abdulkadir, whose profile describes him as a freelance journalist, tweeted: "Got off the phone with a journo in Kano, as he was racing to safety, a bomb exploded in the area he was heading to."

Jeremy Weate, who blogs about Nigeria, posted: "My friend in Kano reports: 'It's bloody serious. The city is closed down with shooting now going on in all parts of Kano.'"

The chaos erupted as Nigeria faces a growing threat from Boko Haram. It has carried out increasingly sophisticated and bloody attacks in a campaign to implement strict sharia law across Nigeria, a nation of more than 160 million people, roughly equally split between Muslims and Christians.

Boko Haram, whose name means "western education is forbidden/sinful" in the local Hausa language, has been responsible for at least 510 killings last year alone, according to the Associated Press.

So far this year the group – which has warned it will kill Christians living in Nigeria's north – has been blamed for at least 76 deaths, further inflaming religious and ethnic tensions in Nigeria.

Boko Haram also claimed responsibility for a suicide car bombing that targeted the UN headquarters in the capital last August, killing 25 people and wounding more than 100.

In a video released last week Imam Abubakar Shekau, a Boko Haram leader, said the government could not handle attacks by the group.

Although the Nigerian president, Goodluck Jonathan – a Christian from southern Nigeria – has declared emergency rule in some regions, Boko Haram is blamed for almost daily attacks.

Jonathan has said he believes the sect has infiltrated security agencies and government offices in the country, but has offered no evidence to back up the claim.

Earlier this week Kabir Sokoto, thought to have masterminded an attack on a Nigerian church that killed 37 people on Christmas Day, escaped from police custody, still wearing handcuffs, less than a day after being arrested.

buglerbilly

22-01-12, 02:10 AM

JANUARY 21, 2012, 3:03 P.M. ET.

Attacks in Nigeria Kill at Least 143

By DREW HINSHAW

An Islamic militant group in Nigeria staged devastating bomb and gun assaults on government targets in the northern city of Kano, the latest in a series of attacks that appeared aimed at splitting Muslim and Christian communities in Africa's most populous country.

The attacks, which took place late Friday and Saturday, paired bomb blasts with shootings. An Associated Press count, based on hospital records, said that at least 143 people had died. A high-ranking Nigerian security official, who asked not to be identified, said the final toll may be higher than 200.

The Islamic militia Boko Haram claimed responsibility for the attack. A Boko Haram spokesman, with a nom de guerre of Abul Qaqa, said that, during the chaos, Boko Haram had freed several of its members who had been in police custody without a trial.

The group, whose name means "Western Education is Sacrilege," has long targeted government workers and buildings in Africa's most populous nation. But since last month, the group has also stepped up attacks on Christians living in the country's overwhelmingly Muslim north, in an apparent effort to sow divisions between the two groups.

Authorities blamed Boko Haram for at least 510 killings last year alone, according to an AP count. This year, the group had been blamed for 76 more—including two journalists—before Friday's attacks.

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
A police office burns Friday in the Nigerian city of Kano, hit by bombings and gun battles.

Analysts say the explosion in violence is an attempt by the group to further discredit a government that is already using soldiers to quell nationwide protest over the high price of motor fuel. Resentment with President Goodluck Jonathan, a Christian from the south, has remained high in the economically deprived, mostly-Muslim north, since he won re-election in April, over complaints that the post should have rotated to a Muslim.

Friday and Saturday's attack has underscored fears that Nigeria lacks the intelligence personnel to keep up with the group, which appears to be splintering into separate factions—some with more aggressive antigovernment agendas than others.

This attack, targeting Nigeria's security forces, is a "message of intimidation," said Peter Pham, director of the Washington, D.C.-based Atlantic Council. "It's sending a message to the community: The government can't even protect itself, so don't count on them."

The freeing of Boko Haram members in police detention is the second in a week. Last Sunday, Boko Haram militants freed the alleged planner behind a Christmas Day church bombing that killed 37. The group had threatened to free its members in an open letter to the state's governor, Rabi'u Musa Kwankwaso, last year.

On Saturday, Governor Kwankwaso responded by dispatching police throughout the state. Mr. Kwankwaso called for a dusk-to-dawn curfew, and police set up roadblocks through the sprawling city of nine million.

But analysts say those tactics are no different from the steps Nigerian officials have consistently used during the country's now nine-year conflict with Boko Haram. Nigerians are increasingly questioning the police and military response, one that relies more on labor-intensive check points rather than intelligence operations that could provide tips on weapons or the composition of the group.

"Government is responding in their traditional way—unnecessary checkpoints," the Nigerian security agency official said. "It's really not been yielding the right results."

Nigerian officials have attempted to provide more resources to counter terrorism.

Nigeria's 2012 budget contains the largest amount the country has ever spent on security—one-fifth of all federal outlays. Yet almost-daily attacks have undermined faith in Nigeria's army, and the country's president. Earlier this month, Mr. Jonathan acknowledged Boko Haram had compromised his security. He said members had infiltrated the government, including its judiciary.

Meanwhile, a state of emergency imposed starting last month in Boko Haram's northeast Nigeria heartland seems to have only emboldened the group to strike outside the deeply poor region.

Cities throughout the country are being patrolled with soldiers, tasked with discouraging another round of protests over gas prices. Tens of thousands of demonstrators marched through Nigeria's biggest cities this month after government scrapped a subsidy that had kept gasoline within the reach of the deeply poor population.

—Associated Press contributed to this article.

buglerbilly

26-01-12, 03:49 PM

East Africa Is the New Epicenter of America’s Shadow War

By Spencer Ackerman Email Author January 26, 2012 | 6:30 am

When Adm. Eric Olson, the former leader of U.S. Special Operations Command, wanted to explain where his forces were going, he would show audiences a photo that NASA took, titled “The World at Night.” The lit areas showed the governed, stable, orderly parts of the planet. The areas without lights were the danger zones — the impoverished, the power vacuums, the places overrun with militants that prompted the attention of elite U.S. troops. And few places were darker, in Olson’s eyes, than East Africa.

Quietly, and especially over the last two to three years, special operations forces have focused on that very shadowy spot on NASA’s map (see below). The successful Tuesday night raid to free two humanitarian aid workers from captivity in Somalia is only the most recent and high-profile example. More and more elite forces have transited through a mega-base in Djibouti that’s a staging ground for strikes on al-Qaida allies in the Horn of Africa, especially in Somalia.

It’s not quite the new Pakistan, or even the new Yemen, but it’s close — especially as new bases for the U.S.’s Shadow Wars pop up and expand. The U.S. military sometimes seemed like it was casting about for a reason to set up shop in Africa. Counterterrorism has given it one.

Fighting Somalia’s pirates might get most of the media attention. But the U.S. is much more concerned about al-Shabab. The al-Qaida aligned movement seeks to depose the Somali government, recruits from radicalized American Muslims and may have sought to bring terrorism back to U.S. shores. Just across a very narrow Gulf of Aden is Yemen, the home of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, which has repeatedly tried to attack America.

In 2009, the top U.S. intelligence official pointed to Yemen and “parts of Africa” where al-Qaida’s leadership might “relocate” if it lost its Pakistani safe haven, to “exploit a weak central government and close proximity to established recruitment, fundraising, and facilitation networks.” His successor told Congress in 2011 that al-Shabab would “probably grow stronger… absent more effective and sustained activities to disrupt them.”

That’s where the forces Olson used to run came in.

Located northwest of Somalia is a former French Foreign Legion base in Djibouti called Camp Lemonnier. The U.S. military has been there for a decade. It’s a resupply point for U.S. ships passing by, as well as the home of a multinational, American-led counterterrorism team called the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa.

Recently, more and more special operations forces have called it a temporary home. Camp Lemonnier was where the commando team took hostages Jessica Buchanan and Poul Thisted for medical care after freeing them. But the camp is much more than just a big medical facility: it’s also a staging ground for the growing Shadow War in Somalia — and particularly a drone war over it.

Much of the day-to-day fight against al-Shabab is outsourced to African peacekeepers. But the raids and strikes that U.S. commandos have launched against specific Shabab targets are becoming more frequent. Cruise missiles and even, apparently, U.S. helicopter strikes have also hit the group. Special operators even launch raids at sea: this spring, they captured captured one Shabab affiliate, Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, offshore in the Gulf of Aden before detaining him for weeks aboard the U.S.S. Boxer.

Then comes the drone war. Lemonnier isn’t the only U.S. base near the Horn. Throughout the last decade, the military ran a smaller special-operations base in Kenya and another in Ethiopia. Now an Ethiopian outpost will become a launchpad for U.S. drones, as will a facility nearby in the Seychelles, all to launch strikes against al-Qaida allies in East Africa. The most recent of them struck Sunday outside Mogadishu, killing a British-born militant.

Nor is the military the only U.S. organization at work in east Africa. Somalia has attracted the CIA as well, which runs a secret prison attached to the Mogadishu airport. During earlier iterations of the CIA’s post-9/11 involvement in Somalia, it blustered that its operations were protected by drones that actually weren’t overhead — all while it assembled a coalition of friendly warlords to help fight al-Qaida. Nor has the FBI been left out of the action: it worked with the special operations forces to free Buchanan and Thisted on Tuesday night, although Navy Capt. John Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman, said no FBI personnel accompanied the raiding team.

Another dramatic expansion of U.S. power in Africa, however, may have been hiding in plain sight.

When President George W. Bush created the U.S. Africa Command in 2007, it wasn’t really clear what the organization was. Humanitarian aid dispensary? Laboratory for African troops to train with their U.S. counterparts? Vehicle for Americanization of Africa’s wars?

The question hasn’t totally been settled. But Africa Command has had a very busy year. In March, it led the initial phase of the U.S./NATO war on Moammar Gadhafi, launching a fusillade of Tomahawk missiles, flew jamming jets and operated conventional ships, subs and fighter jets before handing the war off to a Canadian general. In October, it sent a small advisory force to central Africa to help combat the brutal Lord’s Resistance Army.

Its leader, Army Gen. Carter Ham, hasn’t been in charge for a full year yet, but his busy schedule thus far was capped by last night’s Somalia raid — for which he was the senior-most officer in command, according to the Pentagon. The raid is a sign that Africa Command places great emphasis on its relationship with the U.S.’ elite forces, who, tacitly, help entrench the command’s relevance.

That’s going to remain the case as long as a decimated al-Qaida relies on proxies like al-Shabab to retain its own relevance. And it’s going to remain the case as long as Obama leans on special operators and the CIA to prosecute his Shadow Wars, which pursue terrorists indefinitely even while Obama draws down the large land wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. When looking at where counterterrorism goes next, it helps to squint at the obscured places on Olson’s map.

Photos: David Axe, NASA

buglerbilly

28-01-12, 07:09 AM

Boko Haram vows to fight until Nigeria establishes sharia law

Exclusive: Spokesman for Islamist group says it will not stop deadly attacks until country is ruled according to dictates of Allah

Monica Mark in Abuja

guardian.co.uk, Friday 27 January 2012 18.39 GMT

A screengrab from YouTube reportedly shows the Boko Haram leader, Abubakar Shekau, who threatens in an audio message to bomb schools in Nigeria. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

The Islamist group Boko Haram, which has killed almost 1,000 people in Nigeria, will continue its campaign of violence until the country is ruled by sharia law, a senior member has told the Guardian.

"We will consider negotiation only when we have brought the government to their knees," the spokesman, Abu Qaqa, said in the group's first major interview with a western newspaper. "Once we see that things are being done according to the dictates of Allah, and our members are released [from prison], we will only put aside our arms – but we will not lay them down. You don't put down your arms in Islam, you only put them aside."

Qaqa, whose name is a pseudonym, said the group's members were spiritual followers of al-Qaida, and claimed they had met senior figures in the network founded by Osama bin Laden during visits to Saudia Arabia.

The interview comes a week after Boko Haram claimed responsibility for Nigeria's single deadliest terrorist attack, which killed 186 people in the northern city of Kano.

In an audio message posted on YouTube on Friday, the group's current leader, Abubakar Shekau, threatened to bomb schools and kidnap family members of government officials.

"If [security forces] are going to places of worship and destroying them, like mosques and Quranic schools, you have primary schools as well, you have secondary schools and universities, and we will start bombing them."

Shekau rejected calls for a negotiated peace from President Goodluck Jonathan, who on Thursday called for the shadowy sect to step out of the shadows and engage in dialogue.

Nigerian officials have voiced hopes for a negotiated settlement with "moderate elements" of the group. "Under the circumstances, if you look hard enough, you can find moderate elements you can communicate with," General Andrew Azazi, the national security adviser to the president, told the Wall Street Journal on Friday.

Western diplomats say Boko Haram has splintered and the hardliners leading the factions responsible for the wave of violence that has killed some 250 people this year appear to have rejected any suggestion of dialogue.

The Guardian was able to contact Abu Qaqa through an intermediary from the group's home state. The go-between has been in contact with the group since its inception, and met with its founder, Mohammed Yusuf, several times before he was killed in 2009. For most of the interview he used a voice modulator, but local journalists confirmed that his undisguised voice matched recordings of previous interviews.

Qaqa said Shekau and others had travelled to Saudi Arabia for training and funding. "Al-Qaida are our elder brothers. During the lesser Hajj [last August], our leader travelled to Saudi Arabia and met al-Qaida there. We enjoy financial and technical support from them. Anything we want from them we ask them."

He said recruits from neighbouring Chad, Cameroon and Niger had joined the group. A recent UN report said weapons from Libya may have been smuggled to Boko Haram and al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb via Chad, Niger and Nigeria.

Security officials and diplomats in Abuja said they had no evidence of a link with al-Qaida in Saudi Arabia, but an official confirmed that "elements of Boko Haram have made contact with external groups". The extent and frequency of that contact was unknown, the official said.

In the decade since it first appeared, Boko Haram has graduated from crude driveby attacks on beer parlours to bombing security buildings in the northern Muslim heartland. Its most audacious attack targeted the United Nations building in the capital, Abuja, killing 25 in August. In recent weeks, Christians institutions have increasingly come under fire. A Christmas Day bomb attack on a packed church just outside the capital claimed almost 40 lives.

But Qaqa said the rights of the country's 70 million Christians, who represent half of Nigeria's population, "would be protected" under the group's envisioned Islamic state. "Even the prophet Mohammed lived with non-Muslims and he gave them their dues." But he said everyone must abide by sharia law: "There are no exceptions. Even if you are a Muslim and you don't abide by sharia, we will kill you. Even if you are my own father, we will kill you."

Speaking fluent but non-native Hausa, the lingua franca across the Sahelian belt on the cusp of the Sahara desert, he said: "It's the secular state that is responsible for the woes we are seeing today. People should understand that we are not saying we have to rule Nigeria, but we have been motivated by the stark injustice in the land. People underrate us but we have our sights set on [bringing sharia to] the whole world, not just Nigeria."

Sharia law is already in place across 12 states in the Muslim-majority north. Few believe the group's radical ideology has traction in Nigeria's mainly Christian south, which is also home to millions of Muslims and has so far been out of the group's reach.

Raising his voice for the only time during the interview, Qaqa denied reports that some governors in northern Nigeria paid the group monthly allowances in exchange for immunity from attacks. "May God punish anyone that said so," he said, before adding that the group has popular support in the north.

"Poor people are tired of the injustice, people are crying for saviours and they know the messiahs are Boko Haram.

"People were singing songs in [northern cities] Kano and Kaduna saying: 'We want Boko Haram'," Qaqa said, describing how the group can blend into the communities in which it operates. "If the masses don't like us they would have exposed us by now. When Islam comes everyone would be happy," he said.

Diplomats say Nigeria's security services are belatedly attempting to gain control of the situation, which was previously dismissed as an internal, northern squabble often fuelled by politicians with personal grievances.

"There is an ongoing review of all security agencies," the presidential aide Ken Wiwa said. "This is a relatively new phenomenon in Nigeria and the administration is working hard to improve its capacity to respond. There are various other initiatives which will be implemented but this is as much a political as a security issue."

An official said Nigeria's central bank was involved in measures aimed at strangling the group's external funding sources, including speeding up a cashless economy.