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Al-Qaeda plans to divide and conquer Africa
 The world has heard the sound of the African oil boom. So has al-Qaeda. The continent has more than 75.4 billion barrels of proven reserves, edging toward 10 percent of the world's total. Five large producers - Nigeria, Libya, Algeria, Egypt and Angola -top the list of African oil exporting countries. Lesser producers, such as Chad, are also in the mix. Sub-Sahara Africa supplies as much oil to the United States as Saudi Arabia. Al-Qaeda sees Africa as a prize well worth going after. It is a graveyard of failed states, of corrupt governments whose power seldom goes much beyond capital city shantytowns and of areas of Muslim radicalism. The problems of the region are opportunities for Al-Qaeda.At the same time, al-Qaeda strategic moves in Africa serve its larger purpose of attacking Western economies. In 2002, Ubeid al-Qurashi, a pseudonym of an Osama bin Laden lieutenant, wrote an article saying that Western economies cannot stand high oil prices. One way to strike fear into the West, he wrote, is by repeated attacks on oil installations or on tankers. After the attack on the French tanker Limburg, in October 2002, the al-Qaeda political bureau described the attack as not merely an attack on a tanker. Rather, al-Qaeda said, it was an attack against international transport lines and an attack on the West' s commercial lifeline, petroleum. Terror and attacks on Western economies are one part of al-Qaeda ' s grand plan. A second part counts on the vulnerabilities in the continent that will allow al-Qaeda to establish radical Islamism in one state after another. Nigeria is a case in point. The tenth largest producer in the world, 95 percent of Nigeria's foreign exchange comes from oil. It has close to 25 billion barrels of proven reserves, and major explorations are underway for more. Posted by: Dan Darling 2005-02-01 |
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