Horn of Africa is now terror territory (Daily News)

Horn of Africa is now terror territory

October 23, 2006 Edition 1

Chris Tomlinson

NAIROBI: From the Red Sea to Lake Victoria, the Horn of Africa is one of the few places in the world where, if careful, a traveller can move 2 300km across four countries without producing a passport or encountering a single government official.

These footpaths, back roads and rivers have been used for centuries by merchants and slave traders, explorers, smugglers and bandits. Rebels easily sneak around the central governments in the big cities. So could any traveller. Even a terrorist.

Corrupt governments, porous borders, widespread poverty and discontented Muslim populations have created a region ripe for Islamic fundamentalism. The Horn of Africa, home to about 165 million people, is roughly half the area of the United States.

The six countries that make up the Horn Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya and Djibouti - could become the next major front in the war on terrorism. Kenyan police earlier this year caught a smuggler trying to bring in an anti-aircraft missile.

Kenya, and Tanzania just to its south, have already been victims of Al-Qaeda terrorism, with the bombings at the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998, and attacks on a hotel and an Israeli airliner in Kenya in 2002. The attacks emanated from neighbouring Somalia, which has had no effective central government since 1992, and has a growing Islamic fundamentalist movement.

Western and regional diplomats, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic, said they believe another terrorist attack could be eminent.

Robert Rotberg, director of Harvard University's programme on Intrastate Conflict and Conflict Resolution, said every country in the region is at risk because radicals see an opportunity to take advantage of weak, unpopular governments. Ethnic Somalis are the common denominator in the Horn of Africa, and their large presence in neighbouring countries has long been a source of conflict. In the mid-1970s, then Somali President Mohamed Siad Barre advocated expanding the country's borders to unite all Somali-speaking people in Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti. [Read more..]