Horn of Africa arrests dozens of militants-US
By Katie Nguyen
NAIROBI, March 17 (Reuters) – Horn of Africa countries have arrested dozens of people linked to militant groups and disrupted planned attacks in the region in the past 15 months, the head of a U.S.-led anti-terror task force said on Wednesday.
“There have been dozens of people arrested. Every country that has partnered with us has made arrests,” Brigadier General Mastin Robeson, force commander of the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA), told Reuters in an interview.
“Every one of (the arrests involve) significant members of the terrorist organisations here — all of them are not necessarily al Qaeda. But all of them are involved in the terrorist operations here in the form of operators, planners, financiers or supporters.”
He said the arrests had been carried out by the security forces of Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, Kenya, Djibouti and Yemen since his force was inaugurated in December 2002 to bolster Washington’s “war on terror” in the Horn and East Africa.
Robeson did not elaborate on the arrested militants but he suggested the arrests had been made after his team reinvigorated national anti-terror efforts in a region seen by Washington as particularly vulnerable to militants.
Between 1,300 and 1,600 task force personnel are based at Camp Lemonier, a former French Foreign Legion post in Djibouti, charged with covering an area two-thirds the size of the United States.
Washington fears al Qaeda cells may be seeking new havens on the continent where weak political institutions coupled with poor policing of deserts and coastlines have made it a potentially fertile recruiting and training ground for militants bent on mass attacks on civilians.
Analysts say one of the task forces toughest challenges is lawless Somalia where a U.N. report said al Qaeda fighters trained and armed themselves before launching a suicide bomb attack on an Israeli-owned hotel near the Kenyan resort of Mombasa in November 2002.
Somalia is now cited by U.S. officials as an ideal hideout for militants seeking to plan attacks. Intelligence reports last year said Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, who the FBI suspects of organising a 1998 car bomb attack on the U.S. embassy in Nairobi that killed more than 200 people, had been spotted in Somalia.
Robeson said the country’s chaos was a hindrance.
The task force aims to strengthen intelligence-sharing in the Horn of Africa where rivalry for land and political influence has often hurt relations between neighbours.
“The long-term goal is to have communications directly from my headquarters into each one of these countries, our department of defense headquarters as well, where we can share real-time intelligence information without it having to come through message traffic,” Robeson said.