Yesterday the U.S. State Department
announced rewards totaling $33 million for information about the location of
seven key leaders of Somalia’s al Shabaab Islamic militant group, seeking for the
first time to target the top leadership of that organization; the increasingly
precise, and increasingly lethal, U.S. drone campaign
against al Qaeda and al Qaeda-affiliated organizations in Pakistan, a campaign
which has killed hundreds of Islamic militants and dozens of their leaders,
owes its success to one thing: good intelligence; the United States is now
increasing its anti-terrorist intelligence collection efforts in Africa
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| al-Shabab |
The increasingly precise, and
increasingly lethal, U.S. drone campaign against al Qaeda and al
Qaeda-affiliated organizations in Pakistan has killed hundreds of Islamic
militants and dozens of their leaders. Just one example: after Osama bin laden
was killed by U.S. Special Forces last spring, there were five leaders in al
Qaeda’s top echelons who were considered as potential replacement. Four of them
have been taken out by the United States since last August.
The drone campaign against militants
in Pakistan, a campaign which began under the Bush administration but the Obama
administration has intensified and expanded the campaign dramatically, owes its
success to one thing: good intelligence. The U.S. intelligence services,
relying on both SIGINT and human intelligence, have been able to breach al
Qaeda’s tight security arrangements, compromise the organization’s
communications, and penetrate al Qaeda’s cells at the village level.
This achievement is all the more
remarkable because at least some elements within the Pakistani intelligence
services and military actively help the militants. For this reason the United
States does not share most of the intelligence it gathers – and none of the
pre-strikes operational details – with the Pakistanis because past experience
proves that such information, when shared with the Pakistanis, reaches targeted
militants within minutes, allowing them to escape and disperse.
As al Qaeda’s capabilities in
Pakistan have been degraded, alternative theaters for militant operations
offered themselves: Yemen, Somalia, and several countries in west Africa (Mali,
Niger, Mauritania). These countries share several characteristics: large
territories, small populations, and weak central governments:
- The “government” of Somalia (the term is placed in double quotation marks because it would otherwise be misleading) controls no more than a few blocks in the center of Mogadishu, if that. The rest of Somalia is controlled by different clans and warlords.
- In Mali, following a military coup on 22 March, Tuareg rebels took control over two-thirds of the country, gave it the name Azawad, and declared independence. The territory is the size of France but has a population of between one-and-a-half and two million – of which some 400,000 have already fled. They have fled because a fundamentalist Islamic movement, the Ansar Dine, has now wrested control of Azawad from the Tuareg rebels, imposed a strict Sharia law, and invited Jihadists from Pakistan and Afghanistan to help control the new nation.
The United States has been
increasing its counter-terrorist operations in Yemen for two years now. The
Obama administration is now
Source: Homeland Security News Wire
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