Somalia, Libya, Uganda: US military increases focus on militant threats from Africa

By Associated Press, Published: October 27

NAIROBI, Kenya — While putting few U.S. troops at risk, the United States is playing a growing role in Africa’s military battles, using special forces advisers, drones and tens of millions of dollars in military aid to combat a growing and multifaceted security threat.

Once again, the focus is Somalia, the lawless nation that was the site of America’s last large-scale military intervention in Africa in the early 1990s. By the time U.S. forces departed, 44 Army soldiers, Marines and airmen had been killed and dozens more wounded.

Comments

( Stephen Wandera, File / Associated Press ) - FILE - In this Wednesday, April 20, 2011 file photo, U.S. Army soldiers are seen with Uganda People’s Defence Force soldiers at the closing ceremony for operation ATLAS DROP 11, an annual joint aerial delivery exercise, in Soroti, about 400 kilometers east of Uganda’s capital city Kampala. While putting few U.S. troops at risk, the United States is providing intelligence and training to fight militants across the continent, from Mauritania in the west along the Atlantic Ocean, to Somalia in the east along the Indian Ocean.

This time the United States is playing a less visible role, providing intelligence and training to fight militants across the continent, from Mauritania in the west along the Atlantic coast, to Somalia in the east along the Indian Ocean.

The renewed focus on Africa follows a series of recent and dramatic attacks.

In August, a hard-line Islamist group in Nigeria known as Boko Haram bombed the U.N. headquarters in the capital, Abuja, killing 24 people. A year earlier, militants from the Somali group al-Shabab unleashed twin bombings in Kampala, Uganda, that killed 76. And a Nigerian man tried to blow up an airliner over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009 during a flight that originated from Lagos, Nigeria.

Most worrisome to the United States is al-Shabab, an al-Qaida-linked group in Somalia that has recruited dozens of Americans, most of Somali descent.

“If you ask me what keeps me awake at night, it is the thought of an American passport-holding person who transits through a training camp in Somalia and gets some skill and then finds their way back into the United States to attack Americans,” Gen. Carter Ham, the commander of the U.S. Africa Command, said in Washington this month. “That’s mission failure for us.”

U.S. and European officials also worry that AQIM — an al-Qaida group that operates in the west and north of Africa — is working to establish links with Boko Haram and al-Shabab, the Somali insurgent group.

“I think the security threats emanating from Africa are being taken more seriously than they have been before, and they’re more real,” said Jennifer Cooke, the director of the Africa program at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The U.S. is conducting counterterrorism training and equipping militaries in countries including Algeria, Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Tunisia to “preclude terrorists from establishing sanctuaries,” according to the U.S. Africa Command.

In Somalia, the U.S. helps support 9,000 troops from Uganda and Burundi to fight militants in Mogadishu, the Somali capital. In June, the Pentagon moved to send nearly $45 million in military equipment, including four drones, body armor and night-vision and communications gear, for use in the fight against al-Shabab.

The U.S. also announced this month it is sending 100 advisers, most of them special forces, to help direct the fight against the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army in Central Africa and efforts to kill or capture its leader, Joseph Kony, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court. In Libya, U.S. fighter planes helped rebels defeat former dictator Moammar Gadhafi.