Terrorism and U.S. Counter-Terrorism Programs in Africa: An Overview

A casual reading of major newspapers would leave one with the impression that terrorists are running rampant across Africa. Terrorists are said to hide out in the multiple lawless and stateless areas that litter the continent; they supposedly gain recruits from among the starving and displaced masses who have been victimized by powerful warlords and governments that are fighting over the continent's spoils. Militant Islamic recruiters are thought to prey on vulnerable communities, building militant organizations and recruiting the next generation of suicide bombers from the ranks of the poor Africans. This is, to state it mildly, a vast oversimplification of both the nature of terrorist recruitment and the terrorist threat in Africa. First of all, organized terrorist groups no not rampantly proliferate across the continent. Prior to 2001, there were no designated foreign terrorist organizations in Sub-Saharan Africa. There have been a number of organizations that area governments label as terrorists, yet the United States has been hesitant to recognize the groups as such, for the understandable reason that in many cases, area governments are labeling opposition groups terrorists in order to gain support to combat their opponents. Second, these sentiments are an overstatement of the influence of militant Islam across the continent, and a misunderstanding of the nature of terrorism. Terrorism in Africa is not confined to the realm of the radical Islamists, though those are the groups that receive the most attention. Of the three Sub-Saharan groups that have found their way onto the other designated organizations lists maintained by the State Department, only one (Al Ittihad Al Islamiyya, AIAI, of Somalia), was Islamist. The other two included the former military of Rwanda (the ex-FAR) and a Christian terrorist group in Uganda, the Lords Resistance Army (LRA). al-Qaeda, obviously on the list of designated FTOs, operates in Africa, but is not from Africa. Published in the Journal of Strategic Insights v6 n1, Jan 2007.