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| Africa: North |
| Diamonds, drugs, and GSPC draw US to Africa |
| 2005-07-29 |
| The FBI plans to open two offices in West Africa early next year, a region where South American drug cartels, international diamond smugglers and Islamic extremists are all thought to be operating. The U.S. law enforcement agency, one of whose main priorities is protecting the United States from terrorist attacks, will set up offices in Senegal's capital Dakar and one in Freetown, Sierra Leone, an FBI spokesman in Washington said. Security analysts say the main concerns in the vast region are pockets of Islamic militants in and around the Sahara desert and organised crime groups dealing in drugs, human trafficking and money laundering along the West African coast. "The failure by some states in the region to enforce law and order coupled with a culture of impunity facilitates criminal transactions," Antonio Mazzitelli, head of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime in West and Central Africa, told Reuters. "These conditions can easily be exploited by terrorist groups looking for safe havens and logistics bases," he said. One of Washington's main fears in the Sahel region, the arid band of savannah on the Sahara's southern fringe, is the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), an Algerian militant group which has pledged allegiance to al Qaeda. The GSPC, created in 1998 to overthrow the ruling authorities in Algeria and set up a purist Islamic state, is increasingly setting its sights on foreign targets after being weakened by security forces in its homeland, analysts say. "They certainly have an anti-Western focus and they are in western Europe and sharing ideologies with al Qaeda," said Sara Daly, an analyst at the RAND Corporation which conducts studies on a range of issues for the Pentagon. Christophe Chaboud, head of the French Anti-Terrorism Coordination Unit, told Le Monde this month the GSPC had asked Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, head of al Qaeda's Iraq wing, for support and that the group posed a direct threat to France. "They are trying to develop regionally, in sub-Saharan Africa, but also in France. Any wish to externalise jihad on their part risks materialising on our territory," he said. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |