Death in Ivory Coast: Africa on the point of exploding

(To Giampiero Venturi)
15/03/16

The attack in Grand Bassam in the Ivory Coast claimed by AQMI (Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb) says nothing new. Since the opening of the "African front" with the 1998 attacks on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the process of radicalization of Islam on the continent has not been stopped. Al Qaeda then claimed the attacks as revenge for the Clinton initiative in Somalia (Restore Hope) and opened the band of the Sahara and the Sahel to the jihadist drift.

Twenty years later, the same acronyms, the same blood but in a now degenerate frame. To date, the involvement of the black continent in the scenarios adjacent to fundamentalism is no longer a solution of territorial continuity between the Atlantic and the Horn of Africa. Senegal, Sierra Leone, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Chad and the Central African Republic, up to Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia, with different modalities and intensity are witnesses of a progressive path of entrenchment of Islamic fundamentalism.

To better understand the phenomenon we must consider two aspects: an endemic, linked to Africa; one imported from outside.

In the iconography of the Middle Western man, Africa is often depicted as a remote continent, far from the Eurasian political dynamics. The political and cultural center of gravity of Africa is actually the high end of the continent, the one that extends horizontally between the equator and the Mediterranean. It is worth remembering that 10 of the 22 Arab League member states are African. Practically half, considering the suspension of Syria since November 2011. In addition to the riotous belt of the Maghreb, states such as Somalia, Sudan and Mauritania, pictorially African, are part of that Arab world that we consider too quickly only Middle Eastern.

The data is not secondary, indeed it is the bridge between Africa and the political pressures that forge it from outside. The recent orientations of the Arab League (the condemnation of Hezbollah, to name the last in temporal order) highlight an increasingly evident Sunni supremacy led by Saudi Arabia. It is easy to imagine the subjection of African members to the funding of Riyadh; even easier to understand its importance in the light of the growing weight of the Saud dynasty in the Middle East. In this sense, nothing explains us better than the war in Yemen: the Saudi-led Arab coalition manages to involve African countries such as Senegal which at least on paper should not have geopolitical interests in the area. If we add that the coalition is militarily allied to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), disturbing scenarios open up.

Noting that the "Arabization of Africa" ​​has gone hand in hand with the spread of fundamentalism on the continent is a risky concept? Probably not, above all if we take into consideration that the ability of penetration of fundamentalist groups in the African territory of the last decade, has seen to prevail just Al Qaeda, a group with ideological background Wahhabi...

The obvious Islamist penetration of African soil is accompanied by the economic, political and social precariousness of historically non-Muslim nations, but which end up being a natural basin for fundamentalist proselytism, as happened in the large Middle Eastern urban areas (the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo, for example).

The most obvious cases are Mali and Nigeria theaters of bloody civil wars. The war in Mali conducted in the 2012 since MLNA, the independentists of Azawad, then became the prerogative of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, until the French intervention of the 2013 is necessary. 

That in Nigeria, still in progress, opens endless retrospectives on the Islamist phenomenon of Boko Haram, Now "operational" by the 2000 and the 2015 affiliated to the Islamic State.

Precisely on the connections with the Islamic State it is good to point out. From many sources we highlight the rivalry between Al Qaeda and ISIS that would lead to internal struggles against the Islamist galaxy, in a sort of jihadist civil war. The news of the umpteenth sighting of Khaled Abou al-Abbas better known as Mokhtar Belmokhtar (or as "Il Guercio"), head of Al Mourabitoun, jihadist group integrated to AQMI precisely. He is responsible for the most spectacular attacks in West Africa over the past three years: in Aménas in Algeria, in Agadez and Arlit in Niger, in hotels in Bamako in Mali, in Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso, for almost 150 total deaths. The terrorist leader would have been sighted in Libya, where the Islamic State appears to have more charm than Al Qaeda. Perhaps it is not a coincidence and the rivalries between the two terrorist cartels are only linked to leadership and not to strategies and basic objectives.

We have been supporting this for a long time: rather than extolling the internal differences, it would be good to consider the jihadist galaxy as a whole, shedding light on the geopolitical games of the powers that support it.

Emblematic in this regard is the news coming from Algiers: the terrorist leader Mouloud Baal, was allegedly killed in an army operation near the capital. Former GIA, Baal would have been the leading figure of AQIM to then join the Caliphate. His curriculum explains more than many analyzes ...

In general indifference, in the Ivory Coast we now count 18 dead from the attack on Grand Bassam. Meanwhile, driven by its external donors, the long wave of fundamentalism continues to penetrate between the Atlantic and the Red Sea, on sodden social and state grounds. More and more every day, in silence. From Dakar to Eritrea (in the political and economic sights of the Emirates), from Bamako to Al Bashir's Arab Sudan; from the Nigerian states of the North to Al Shabab in Somalia ... anti-Western radicalism in Africa is growing exponentially.

The chilling fact is that the West itself feeds its flows more or less indirectly.

(Photo: Armée de terre / Armée ivoirienne)

Read also:

War in the Sahel 

America in Africa: project or fear?