US sends its special forces as Africa’s jihadist threat grows

By Ed Blanche

A U.S. Army Special Forces weapons sergeant speaks to a group of Nigerian soldiers during Exercise Flintrock 2017 in March in Diffa, Niger. Photo by Spec. Zayid Ballesteros/U.S. Army

Beirut- The October 12 bombing of central Mogadishu in So­malia, which killed more than 270 people, along with the death of four US special forces troops in a jihad­ist ambush on the other side of the vast continent in south-western Niger, marked a sharp escalation in Africa’s war on terror.

That is likely to trigger a signifi­cant increase in US military coun­terterrorism operations on the vast continent. This would be in line with US President Donald Trump’s emerging strategy, a carry-over from a campaign of “forward en­gagement” devised by his prede­cessor, Barack Obama, unleashing the US military’s greatly expanded special forces command to hunt down and eliminate the terror cells.

Until recently, the focal point of African terrorism by groups largely affiliated with al-Qaeda and the breakaway Islamic State (ISIS) was North Africa along the Mediterra­nean littoral, the springboard for attacks on Europe.

In recent months, however, those forces extended their reach into West Africa and the sub-Sahara re­gion, while stepping up attacks in Somalia in the Horn of Africa on the Indian Ocean and into neighbour­ing Kenya.

“It is clear that an arc of instabil­ity is emerging across Africa’s Sa­hel, which has opened a path for al-Qaeda to shift its centre of grav­ity from Afghanistan and Pakistan to a new sanctuary and has created a potential launching pad much closer to US and European shores,” analyst Yonah Alexander observed in a report for the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies.

There are an estimated 1,500 US troops in Africa. That’s three times the number the Pentagon admits are in Syria, the eye of the Middle East storm. This is a woefully inad­equate number to make any signifi­cant headway against the major ter­rorist groups across the continent.

With ISIS crippled by a US-led co­alition that has all but destroyed the group’s self-proclaimed caliphate across Syria and Iraq, it is looking for a new base. It tried to muscle in on Libya, which has been gripped by internal chaos since the NATO-backed ouster of Muammar Qaddafi in 2011 but has suffered heavily at the hands of Western-backed gov­ernment troops, including US and British special forces.

Libya remains a battleground and ISIS, despite its setbacks, ap­pears determined to maintain bases in the country and elsewhere. ISIS fighters are holding out in Libya de­spite losing their stronghold in the coastal city of Sirte in 2016.

The deep political fissures in Lib­ya, one of the world’s major oil pro­ducers in better times, “has given the extremists time and space to re­group… in desert areas south-east of Tripoli,” Alexander Sehmer ob­served in Terrorism Monitor, pub­lished by the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation.

ISIS fighters “are also reportedly sharing resources with al-Qaeda, in contrast to other parts of the world where the two organisations are at loggerheads,” Sehmer wrote.

A senior intelligence commander in the Maghreb, speaking on condi­tion of anonymity, told The Arab Weekly that regional leaders ex­pected the jihadists to reinforce their activities in Libya and the Sa­hel from war-torn Somalia. Speak­ing October 10 — four days before the Mogadishu bombings — the of­ficer said: “ISIS is using Somalia as a gateway to push jihadists into the Maghreb and Sahel areas.

“The infiltration began as a trick­le early this year before growing in recent weeks with hundreds of fighters being scattered throughout the region, mostly through Libya.”

There are about a dozen drone bases for surveillance and air strikes across Africa. The main one is in the tiny Horn of Africa state of Djibouti. Built on the site of a for­mer French Foreign Legion facility and still known as Camp Lemon­nier, the large base and airfield can mount air strikes and special forces raids in Yemen and Somalia and cover the strategic Bab el Mandeb Strait that links the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean.

The US Africa Command, known as Africom, was established in 2007 to provide military support to Afri­can states, most of them plagued by poor governance, rampant corrup­tion and ineffectual military forces. Africom has become the organisa­tional hub of US efforts to counter the steady expansion of Islamic extremists, who increasingly pose a direct threat to a continent that has been wracked by war and famine since Europe’s colonising powers — Britain, France, Belgium, Spain and Portugal — granted independence in the 1960s.

The instability that has largely crippled those African countries is a major contributing factor in the spread of Islamist extremism.

In Libya, as in some other coun­tries in the Maghreb and Sahel, the failure to address the common problem of disillusioned and un­employed youth and the reliance largely on military and intelligence operations have seriously undercut efforts to stifle terrorism.

“Islamist terrorist networks are… making inroads due to economic opportunism,” warned Vish Sak­thivel of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. In Algeria, which has battled Islamist terror­ism more or less since 1992, “the problem seems to be worsening,” Sakthivel said.

“Unemployment, disenchant­ment and the lack of opportunity have all helped AQIM [al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb] and its nu­merous splinters survive, while bad governance and corruption have made local communities and even police complicit in their smuggling networks,” he added.

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross of Washington’s Foundation for De­fense of Democracies observed: “State actors will have to improve governance, rule of law and eco­nomic opportunities, especially in the economic and geographic pe­riphery of the region, in order to deny (Islamic State) the ability to recruit and establish safe havens.”

The Sahel, an arid, semi-desert that stretches the width of Africa from Senegal in the west to Eritrea in the east, is the centre of terror­ists’ operations in Africa. The in­hospitable region with its porous borders is favoured by the extrem­ists as a base area and for smuggling weapons, narcotics and people.

The Americans have special forc­es detachments operating in most African states. Washington said their primary mission is to train lo­cal forces in counterterrorism and counter-insurgency operations so they can hold the lines themselves. For now, at least, that is changing to a more pro-active approach and the US Army’s Green Berets and US Navy SEALs largely constitute the US military presence.

Amid the barely noticed US es­calation in Africa, the Americans have also stepped up attacks by missile-armed drones across Libya, where jihadist terror is expected to increase.

Few details of actual US opera­tions are accessible as the Pentagon seeks to convince Americans that they are not being dragged into yet another messy war against terror­ism. The initial Pentagon report on a May 6 operation involving SEALs in Somalia said Senior Chief Petty Officer Kyle Milliken was killed while on an “advise, assist and ac­company mission” in which the American troopers hung back while Somali troops carried attacked a complex held by al-Shabab, the main jihadist group.

That was soon exposed as a fic­tion. US Marine Corps Brigadier- General David J. Furness, com­mander of the US task force in the Horn of Africa, said the American and Somali military personnel were in a single group when they were ambushed.

Milliken was the first US military fatality in Somalia since the Ameri­cans lost 18 men and two Black Hawk helicopters in a day-long bat­tle with Somali fighters on Octo­ber 3, 1993 — the notorious “Black Hawk Down” episode.

Source: The Arab Weekly