President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan will travel to Nairobi tomorrow to participate in a meeting of the African Union’s Peace and Security Council scheduled to hold in the Kenyan capital on Tuesday.
The Nairobi meeting, which is a follow-up to talks by President Jonathan and other African leaders in Pretoria, South Africa in May this year on forging a joint action against terrorism, will receive and consider the report of the Chairperson of the African Union Commission on Terrorism and Violent Extremism in Africa.
Deliberations at the Nairobi Summit and the adoption of the African Chairperson’s Report by President Jonathan, President Uhuru Kenyatta and other participating Heads of State are expected to lead to more collaborative actions by Nigeria and other African countries to rid the continent of acts of terrorism and violent extremism.
The President, who will be accompanied to the Nairobi Summit by the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Dr. Nurudeen Mohammed, the National Security Adviser, Col. Sambo Dasuki (rtd.) as well as other advisers and aides will return to Abuja at the conclusion of the meeting on Tuesday.
Several African nations are facing challenges by a host of terror organisations, some cloaking their movement with religion.
Shekau and gang in new video
Here is a rundown of the terror groups active on African soil:
Hardline fighters threaten multiple nations across sub-Saharan Africa, from well-organised insurgent forces to loose alliances of Islamists who echo a common rhetoric of global jihad.
Here are profiles of some of the key groups.
AQIM, Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb: The group has bases in northern Mali, but has carried out attacks and abductions of Westerners in the sub-Saharan Sahel zone, as well as claiming attacks in Tunisia. Led by Algerian Abdelmalek Droukdel, it stems from a group started in the late 1990s by radical Algerian Islamists, who in 2007 formally subscribed to Al-Qaeda’s ideology.
MUJAO, Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa: An offshoot of AQIM, it advocates jihad, or holy war, in west Africa. It has claimed a number of abductions in Mali and neighbouring Algeria, where it has also claimed several attacks.
BOKO HARAM: Nigeria’s extremist Islamists, accused of killing more than 10,000 people since 2009, have long voiced a desire to create a strict Islamic state within the mainly Muslim north. Leader Abubakar Shekau has declared an “Islamic caliphate” like Islamic State (IS) militants in Iraq and Syria. The tactics of Boko Haram — meaning “Western education is forbidden — have seen a dramatic shift in recent months, from hit-and-run strikes to attacking and holding areas in the remote northeast. It has also struck in neighbouring Cameroon.
LRA, Lord’s Resistance Army: Ugandan-led insurgents infamous for a decades of killing are headed by Joseph Kony, who has melded Christian mysticism with an astute guerrilla mind and bloodthirsty ruthlessness. Long driven out of Uganda, LRA fighters now roam forest regions of Central African Republic, Sudan, South Sudan and Democratic Republic of Congo. The Ugandan army is leading a US-backed African Union force tasked with capturing LRA leaders.
AL-SHEBAB: Somalia’s Al-Qaeda linked insurgents emerged out of 2006 battles to drive out Ethiopian soldiers from Mogadishu and at their peak in 2011, controlled large parts of the capital and swathes of the south. A 22,000-strong African Union force fighting alongside government troops have captured almost all major towns from the extremists, but the group continue to stage guerrilla attacks in the heart of the capital. The group has also threatened or carried a string of attacks in neighbouring nations with troops in the AU force, including Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda. The group is also linked across the Red Sea to Yemen-based franchise of the jihadist network, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).
No comments:
Post a Comment