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Al-Qaeda and the East African threat
By Erich Marquardt

East Africa is no stranger to Islamic militancy. The region has been the victim of a series of al-Qaeda-related attacks against predominately US interests. Because of the large population of Muslims in many of the region's states, it has the potential to become fertile breeding ground to al-Qaeda's religious rhetoric. Through the argument of conducting a "defensive jihad" against the United States, al-Qaeda has been able to recruit East Africans in missions aimed at endangering US interests in the region.

Islamist activity targeted at US interests is a relatively new phenomenon in East Africa. While the region's recent history has been plagued with inter-religious violence, the objectives of such violence have been for state or regional control, and not an attempt to weaken the power and influence of foreign powers.

Al-Qaeda, however, has had some success in recruiting East African Muslims to conduct guerrilla operations with transnational objectives. These operations have primarily been to attack US interests.

The first major attack took place in August 1998. Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for bombing the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. The attacks killed hundreds of people and coincided with the anniversary of the first deployment of US troops to Saudi Arabia in 1990. The US troop commitment to Saudi Arabia has been one of the central motives behind al-Qaeda's attacks against the United States.

Four years later, in November 2002, an al-Qaeda-conducted hotel bombing in Mombassa, Kenya, killed more than a dozen people at the Israeli-owned Paradise Hotel. Minutes before the hotel bombing came an unsuccessful attempt to shoot down an Israeli airliner with a shoulder-held surface-to-air missile. These attacks were meant to coincide with the 55th anniversary of the partition of Palestine.

In addition to these direct attacks, al-Qaeda is believed to have supported various Muslim militant organizations in East Africa, most notably the Somali Islamist organization al-Ittihad al-Islami (AIAI). AIAI's central objective is to create an Islamic government based on Islamic law in what is now Ethiopia and Somalia. The group follows the more radical Saudi-based Wahhabi form of Islam, also followed by Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network.

Washington believes that bin Laden sent al-Qaeda fighters, who had formerly fought in Afghanistan against the Soviet occupation there, to Somalia in 1991-92 to help the AIAI organize itself militarily, in addition to giving advice on how to set up social services for the Somali people. US officials also contend that bin Laden spent about US$3 million to send fighters from the Afghan resistance to Somalia to help set up an Islamic republic there. The goal of al-Qaeda in supporting AIAI is to turn the organization into a popular force in Somalia, in the hopes of the AIAI seizing power from the Somali regime.

While the AIAI managed to conduct a series of attacks in Ethiopia and Somalia, its power has been dramatically reduced ever since 1996, when it provoked the Ethiopian military to launch a series of cross-border raids into Somalia that successfully damaged the operational capability of the AIAI.

There is also the concern that al-Qaeda is exploiting the general lawlessness of East Africa to establish military training facilities there, where militants are taught guerrilla-warfare techniques and then sent to select countries throughout the world to plan and execute attacks on US interests. This concern is especially prevalent now considering that the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan has eliminated the primary country where these facilities were formerly located, forcing al-Qaeda to move its training operations elsewhere.