From: Magharebia
Imrane Binoual in Casablanca contributed to this report for Magharebia
Amid fears Islamic State (ISIS) fighters are inspiring jihadists outside the Middle East, analysts warn the group has emboldened extremists in the Sahel-Sahara zone.
Islamist groups who belong to the al-Qaeda franchise have already firmly implanted themselves across swathes of territory. This ongoing threat, combined with the advance of ISIS, prompted the African Union on September 2nd to hold its first-ever conference on terrorism.
African spy chiefs, who met in Nairobi last month ahead of the conference, also raised alarm over “alliances being built by terror groups worldwide, sophisticated sources of funding” and Africa’s “porous borders”, AFP reported.
African jihadists are apparently watching and learning from ISIS, experts warn.
“The scale and sophistication of recent attacks, along with the increased regionalisation of terrorism by Boko Haram, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and al-Shabaab, demand a more robust collective response, both at the regional and continental level,” the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) said in a recent paper.
The African Union summit in the Kenyan capital began hours after a US drone strike in Somalia killed Ahmed Abdi Godane (aka Mukhtar Abu al-Zubayr), the commander of al-Shabaab.
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“It’s an area that used to see a lot of smuggling of cigarettes, fuel, food and other items… so smuggling is very well established,” the analyst adds.
According to Khalid Chegraoui, a professor at the Institute for African Studies, trafficking from the Sahel towards North Africa and Europe has grown steadily over the past few years, primarily due to the arrival of jihadist groups.
“Many members of these movements were and still are well-known traffickers, such as Mokhtar Belmokhtar, who was a big cigarette-smuggler in his early days and is now one of the leaders of terrorism in the Sahel and Sahara,” Chegraoui says.
