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Al-Qaeda
treats keeps on rolling, becoming more active
Posted By Adam Robertson
Al-Qaeda is becoming “more active in North Africa,
particularly the Maghreb region of Tunisia, Morocco and
Algeria”, the U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack
told reporters on April 13, a day after bomb attacks killed at
least 33 people in Algiers.
The Algeria attacks came just two days after three human
bombers detonated their explosives in the Moroccan capital,
Casablanca, which also witnessed another attack days later
when two bombers blew themselves up near the U.S. diplomatic
offices in the city.
The attacks and the U.S. comments about an active
“al-Qaeda” cell in North Africa raise serious questions.
It’s extremely mysterious that “al-Qaeda” tends to show
up in places targeted by the Bush administration. For example,
Africa, in particular Somalia, and more recently Algeria and
Morocco.
Last February, the U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates
"announced the creation of AFRICOM, which will ultimately
be responsible for all of Africa except Egypt, which has
existing military ties with U.S. Central Command,"
according to Stars and Stripes, a daily newspaper published
for the U.S. military, DoD civilians, contractors, and their
families.
The daily said “AFRICOM’s purpose is to make Africa the
primary concern of one combatant command instead of a
’secondary or tertiary’ concern for three other
commands.”
Some analysts suggested that the formation of AFRICOM
indicates that the Bush administration is planning to expand
its “war on terror” into Africa.
AFRICOM was formed shortly before the United States
used the Ethiopian armed forces, backed by U.S. air power
and small teams of special forces, to oust the Islamic Courts
Union which had stabilized most of Somalia.
"U.S. Special Forces accompanied the Ethiopian Army
when it stormed across the border in late December to support
the besieged and isolated Transitional Federal Government (TFG).
The United States also provided the Ethiopians with
"up-to-date intelligence on the military positions of the
Islamist fighters in Somalia," Pentagon and
counterterrorism officials told The New York Times,"
wrote Conn Hallinan for Foreign Policy In Focus.
"The ostensible reason for U.S. participation in the
invasion was the ICU’s supposed association with al-Qaeda, a
charge that has never been substantiated. U.S. warplanes and
ships shelled and rocketed parts of southern Somalia where
hundreds of civilians have been killed or wounded.”
“The White House’s plans for Africa, which reach far
beyond the Horn of Africa, are part of a general
militarization of U.S. foreign policy. A recent congressional
report found that some embassies have effectively become
command posts, with military personnel in those countries all
but supplanting the role of ambassadors in conducting American
foreign policy,” Hallinan adds.
The United States already spent more than $500 million on
the Trans-Sahel Counterterrorism Initiative that includes
Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria in North Africa, as well as
other countries boarding the Sahara including Mauritania,
Niger, Mali, Mauritania, Chad, and Senegal. It’s worth
mentioning that a major U.S. base in Djibouti housing about
1,800 forces played a key role in Ethiopia’s invasion of
Somalia.
While Africa is expected to provide a quarter of all U.S.
oil imports by 2015, AFRICAOM will start focusing on the Gulf
of Guinea. The gulf countries of Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea,
Gabon, Angola, and the Congo Republic all possess huge oil
reserves. It’s not a surprise that some of these countries
are already suffering from the same kind of
"instability" that AFRICOM was formed to tackle.
And thus the "al-Qaeda" threat keeps on rolling,
out of the Middle East and right into Africa, where there
happens to be an abundance of strategic minerals that will
fuel the expansion of Washington's "war on terror” in
the continent.
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