The Middle East Link to Africa’s Conflicts

In an earlier commentary in this series, I lamented the fact that, despite clear and substantial evidence of terrorist activities, Sub-Saharan Africa remains largely ignored by both policymakers and scholars when it comes to threat assessment and resource allocation in the global war on terror.

This omission becomes even more egregious when one takes stock of another element in the strategic calculus: that there are direct linkages between radical groups and individuals in the terror wars' main theatre, the Greater Middle East, and the conflicts that have wracked the African continent in recent decades.

To the extent it is known in the West, the Sierra Leonean civil war (1991-2002) is remembered for its brutal limb-amputating rebels from the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and its financing through the traffic in so-called “conflict diamonds.”

Less well-known is that much of this illicit trade-before, during, and after the open conflict-was controlled by members the West African country's Lebanese Shi'a Muslim community. Following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the Sierra Leonean Lebanese Shi'a community actively supported the Amal militia, one of the armed groups used by the late Syrian President Hafez al-Assad to drive the U.S.-led multinational peacekeeping force from Beirut as well as to undermine the Lebanese government. In fact, Amal's leader, Nabih Berri, currently speaker of the Lebanese National Assembly, was born in Sierra Leone.

Berri's best friend growing up and ongoing business partner is a shady character named Jamil Said Mohammed, who at one time held monopoly rights to the importation into Sierra Leone of no fewer than eighty-seven commodities.

In 1986, Jamil was instrumental in persuading the Sierra Leonean government in hosting a “state visit” by Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Chairman Yasir Arafat, exiled to Tunis after his humiliating defeat by the Israeli forces in Lebanon and, that year, treated by the international community as a virtual diplomatic leper after a group led by PLO executive committee member Abu Abbas hijacked the Achille Lauro, an Italian cruise ship, holding its 545 passengers and crew members hostage and throwing overboard a 69-year-old wheelchair-bound Jewish American passenger from New York, Leon Klinghoffer.

Arafat offered the Sierra Leone $8 million in exchange for the use of an island as a training base for his exiled fighters. While the offer was officially declined, the Sierra Leonean government did allow Jamil to maintain a 500-man “personal security force,” consisting primarily of Palestinians driven out of Lebanon, effectively enabling the Arafat to achieve the same end of finding a base to keep his fighters together until they could return with him to the West Bank and Gaza following the Oslo Agreement.

More recently, the terrorist group Hezbollah and its allies-including the Palestinians' al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, which carries out attacks on Israeli civilians-have been the principal beneficiaries of Sierra Leone's Lebanese Shi'a community's commercial acumen.

As Larry Andre, deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Freetown told the Associated Press in March, “One thing that's incontrovertible is the financing of Hezbollah. It's not even an open secret; there is no secret.” Last year, for example, the African country officially exported $130 million worth of diamonds. However, officials with the United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL), which wound down its operations at the end of the year, actually somewhere between $300 million and $500 million worth of the stones were exported. These figures indicate that there is no effective regulation of between one-third and two-thirds of a multimillion-dollar industry in which the most prominent traders have known ties to terrorist groups which siphon off part of their profits to pay for violence. And if reports by Douglas Farah of The Washington Post are credited, then al-Qa'eda now also has a stake in the trade.

Sierra Leone's civil war was itself a sideshow of the conflicts that consumed its neighbor to the east, Liberia, from 1989 until 2003. The principal protagonist in the Liberian civil wars, former President Charles Taylor, who was recently extradited to the UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone where he faces trial on eleven counts of war crimes and other crimes against humanity for “bearing the greatest responsibility” for the conflict in Sierra Leone, got his start with the aid from another Middle East spoiler, Libya's Colonel Mu'ammar Qaddafi, to whom he was introduced by Burkina Faso's strongman, Blaise Compaoré.

When his relations with the Arab world soured in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Qaddafi focused his ambitions southward to Sub-Saharan Africa. Part of the strategy was diplomatic, with the mercurial Libyan leader seeking international recognition and respectability denied to him by UN sanctions in meetings with African leaders. However, Qaddafi also pursued a violent strategy, providing unscrupulous potential insurgents like Taylor with training at camps in Libya and other assistance with which to launch their wars. In exchange, the Africans would be the foot soldiers carrying out Qaddafi's geopolitical vision of a pan-African revolution answerable to Tripoli.

While training in Libya, Taylor met another guest of Qaddafi's, Foday Sankoh, an exile from Sierra Leone who had made his way to Libya via Burkina Faso with several dozen other disaffected Sierra Leoneans who received training in guerilla tactics at Benghazi. The meeting between Sankoh and Taylor was the start of what would develop into an increasingly complex series of links between the two men and the destinies of their respective countries. As a consequence of the encounter, some members of Sankoh's nascent RUF group fought alongside Taylor's National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) in its initial campaign against the Liberian government. In return, when the RUF invaded Sierra Leone in 1991, an NPFL “special forces” unit spearheaded the operation. The alliance between the Liberian warlord and the Sierra Leonean insurgent leader, facilitated by the Libyan colonel-who throughout the conflict provided weapons as well as transshipment point for illegal arms from Eastern Europe and natural resources from West Africa-gradually became all-encompassing, contributing to the murder, rape, maiming, and mutilations of over one million Africans, according to testimony given earlier this year by David M. Crane, former prosecutor of the Special Court, at a hearing before the House Subcommittee on Africa, Global Human Rights, and International Operations at which I also testified.

The web of intrigue and violence surrounding the Sierra Leonean civil war is just one example among many others that could be cited where the conflicts of the Middle East, including the terrorist phenomena, have spilled over into Africa. Yet U.S. diplomatic and intelligence officials persist in minimizing links between challenges faced in Africa and those in the Middle East, including terrorist organizations and other militant Islamist groups. America needs to take Africa more seriously, for the sake of U.S. security interests if not for its own sake. The conditions that favored the emergence and success of terrorist groups elsewhere-corruption, lack of government control, little understood “informal networks,” etc.-are present in abundance in Sub-Saharan Africa. Africa's “failed states” have been and continue to be ideal operating conditions for terrorists groups that threaten the precarious balance of our world.

— J. Peter Pham is Director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He is also an academic fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C.

His primary research interest is the intersection of international relations, international law, political theory, and ethics, with particular concentrations on the implications for United States foreign policy and African states as well as religion and global politics.

Dr. Pham is the author of over one hundred essays and reviews on a wide variety of subjects in scholarly and opinion journals on both sides of the Atlantic and the author, editor, or translator of over a dozen books. Among his recent publications are Liberia: Portrait of a Failed State (Reed Press, 2004), which has been critically acclaimed by Foreign Affairs, Worldview, Wilson Quarterly, American Foreign Policy Interests, and other scholarly publications, and Child Soldiers, Adult Interests: The Global Dimensions of the Sierra Leonean Tragedy (Nova Science Publishers, 2005).

In addition to serving on the boards of several international and national think tanks and journals, Dr. Pham has testified before the U.S. Congress and conducted briefings or consulted for both Congressional and Executive agencies.