India News and Travel Times Provides India-centric and other News and Features

The US is reportedly expanding efforts to provide intelligence, training to African nations, to help the countries counter terrorist activities in the region, it has emerged. Addressing a conference that included representatives from African nations, Gen. Carter Ham, Head of U.S. Africa Command said coordinated moves by several Africa-based terrorist groups to share their training, funding and bomb-making materials are causing worry and are posing threats to the U.S. and the region. Ham claimed Africa's three largest Islamist terrorist groups, Boko Haram in Nigeria, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Magreb (AQIM), which is spread across the Sahara, and Al Shabab in Somalia, have been sharing money and explosive materials while training fighters together. "Do we collect information across Africa ? Yes, we do," the ABC News quoted Ham, as saying. "To have some intelligence collection capability that has the ability to monitor the areas in which we believe the Lord's Resistance Army is operating, to be able to see, to be able to listen, to be able to collect information which we then pass to the four nations, four African nations, which are participating, I think is a good way ahead," he added. While Boko Haram and Al Shabab have a strong nationalist bent, Ham claimed recent evidence of cooperation, especially between Boko Haram and AQIM, are particularly of worry to American interests. He pointed to U.S. surveillance in central Africa to try to ferret out rebel leader Joseph Kony and his Lord's Resistance Army and said it is the type of thing the U.S. military can do, but only when invited in to partner with African nations. Last October President Barack Obama sent 100 U.S. forces into central Africa to help regional militaries track Kony.

US military providing intelligence, training to African nations to counter terrorism