“U.S. forces have disrupted several planned terrorist attacks against Western and other targets in the Horn of Africa and local authorities have killed or captured more than two dozen militants, the U.S. general in command of an anti-terrorism task force told The Associated Press.”
This task force “is responsible for fighting terrorism in seven Horn of Africa countries: Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Yemen, Sudan, Kenya and Somalia. The impoverished, Islamic region is a well-established recruiting ground for terrorist groups and U.S. officials describe it as a critical theater in the war on terrorism, which they fear could become another Afghanistan.”
So this tiny extremist fringe group has extensive operations in seven African countries, as well as dozens of other countries worldwide? “Robeson said suspected terrorists from Tanzania, through the Horn of Africa, all the way to southern Egypt and Saudi Arabia are working with each other to promote radicalism.”
“‘There are three issues here: there is transnational terrorist networking, at large, there are specific cells planning terrorist attacks, and there’s the recruiting, training and shipping of foreign fighters into Iraq,’ Robeson said Saturday night at his headquarters on a former French Foreign Legion post in Djibouti.
“‘They are down here training and recruiting,’ he said. ‘They are trying to create numbers and what we want to do is prevent them from creating numbers.'”
How do they recruit? Don’t the moderate Muslims in all these countries easily refute their calls to violent jihad, using the peaceful Qur’an and Sunna?