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Note: The following text is a quote:

http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/025935.php

May 2, 2009

U.S. intel: Some jihadist cells migrating from Pakistan border area to east Africa

This report corroborates an earlier one from July 2008 that noted the same pattern. Interesting, isn’t it, how pockets of “extremists” and “militants” far removed from one another can end up “misunderstanding” and “hijacking” Islam in the same way?

“’Jihadis leaving Af-Pak for Africa’,” from the Times of India, April 29:

WASHINGTON: There is growing evidence that battle-hardened extremists are filtering out of safe havens along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and into east Africa, The alarming shift, according to US military and counterterrorism officials, fuels concern that Somalia is increasingly on a path to become the next Afghanistan — a sanctuary where al-Qaida-linked groups could train and plan attacks on the west. So far, officials say the number of foreign fighters who have moved from southwest Asia and the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region to the Horn of Africa is small, perhaps two to three dozen.
But a similarly small cell of militant plotters was responsible for the devastating 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. And the cluster of militants now operating inside East Africa could pass on sophisticated attack techniques gleaned from seven years at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, US officials said.

“There is a level of activity that is troubling, disturbing,” Gen William “Kip” Ward, head of US Africa Command, said. “When you have these vast spaces that are just not governed it provides a haven for support activities, for training to occur.”

Several military and counterterrorism officials cautioned that the movements of the al-Qaida militants do not suggest an abandonment of the ungoverned Pakistan border region as a safe haven. Instead, the shift is viewed by the officials more as an expansion of al-Qaida’s influence, and a campaign to gather and train more recruits in a region already rife with militants.
Last month, Osama bin Laden made it clear in an audiotape that al-Qaida has set its sights on Somalia. In the tape, he urged Somalis to overthrow their new moderate Islamist president and to support their jihadist “brothers” in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq.

Posted by Marisol at May 2, 2009 7:49 AM