US Says Militants Lurk in Horn of Africa (including al Qaeda)

[Khephra]

US Says Militants Lurk in Horn of Africa
By REUTERS

Published: December 28, 2004


Filed at 0:48 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Militant groups including al Qaeda are exploiting lawless areas in the seven-nation Horn of Africa region to hide, recruit and train members and possibly plan attacks, the head of the region's U.S.-led anti-terror force said Monday.

``We find the terrorist networks here using the fact that there is a lot of ungoverned space in the Horn of Africa,'' said Maj. Gen. Samuel Helland. ``Because of (this) ... it's very easy for a terrorist organization to establish a presence ... It's very easy for them to train, equip, organize and use the facilities that are present to gain a foothold.''

``And I suspect that if we look very hard at the area we'll see that there is some training going on for operations in other parts of the world,'' he said in a telephone interview from Djibouti, where he heads the Combined Joint Task Force overseeing counterterrorism activities in the Horn of Africa.

Since late 2002, Djibouti has hosted U.S. troops using the tiny state as a base to hunt down the kind of militants who attacked the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, killing 200 people.

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-security-africa.html

[LynnTheDem]

1. Ever since OIL was discovered 2 years ago, SUDDENLY al Qaeda is in Africa

Funny the coincidence...discover OIL and voila, they discover al Qaeda.

[Mithras61]

2. Fascinating...

Does this mean Chimpie thinks it's time to go back into Somalia?

[Dover]

3. Oil "lurks" there as well. The U.S. is doing quite a bit of "exploiting"

of lawlessness (which they often covertly create) and military weakness for said oil. Now what is the definition of 'terrorist' again?

[Tab]

4. Duplicate

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