Saturday, December 10, 2011
An offshoot of al-Qaeda is working to turn the whole of Africa's Sahel region, which lies just south of the Sahara, 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.
Motivated; weapons from Libya
“Instability is on the rise,” Spinoza told the Chatham House thinktank in London on December 8. “Without a meaningful policy, the area could constitute a lasting safe haven for jihadists.” Robert Fowler, a former U.N. special envoy to Niger who was held hostage for four months in 2008-9 by al-Qaeda 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. 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 Qadhafi 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 U.N. 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 the region was confronted by rapid population growth, weak and ineffective governance, inter-state tensions, poor access to education and employment, and acute food supply problems exacerbated by climate change and the advance of the Sahara.
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 U.S. 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.