The U.S. and its international partners in Africa have significant gaps in their ability to monitor increasingly violent extremist groups there, the continent’s U.S. commander said Tuesday.
“We can’t see what’s going on enough,” due the limited numbers of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets the command has at its disposal, and the vast areas it monitors that have very little communications infrastructure, U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) commander Gen. David Rodriguez said.
Rodriguez addressed the priorities and needs for AFRICOM in a speech Tuesday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The gaps are worrisome for Rodriguez because of the declining security he sees in several of the countries included in AFRICOM’s area of responsibility. In both Libya and Nigeria, security is on the decline; Libya remains destabilized as a stream of foreign fighters and arms flow through to Syria. Nigeria is enduring “increasingly lethal and complex attacks” by Boko Haram, including the early January slaughter of the town of Baga, as the terrorist organization seeks to expand into Cameroon, Chad and Niger.
The command also continues to monitor flares of violence by the remnants of the Lord’s Resistance Army in South Sudan, Rodriguez said.
Then on Tuesday evening the State Department condemned additional bombings that occurred a week ago by the Sudanese government against the international aid society Doctors without Borders. A week ago, the Sudanese Air Force aerial bombed the group’s Frandala medical facility.
“Approximately 150 patients and staff were in the hospital during midday operations when a Sudan Air Force fighter jet dropped a cluster of 13 bombs of which two landed inside the hospital compound and the others just outside the hospital fence. One MSF staff and one patient were injured and the property suffered damage,” the aid group said in a statement.
AFRICOM’s ability to track all of this is limited not only by the continued limited resources it has at its disposal, which came into sharp focus during the 2012 attacks at the U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, but by the vast area under its watch and the decisions it has to make daily as to where to dedicate its intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance resources.
Rodriguez is responsible for an area covering 54 nations that is 3.5 times the size of the U.S. and includes 15 of the State Department’s “high-risk, high-threat” facilities.
In the years following the attacks both the State Department and Department of Defense scrutinized and modified their security and policies for the region, which led to dedicated Air Force and Army assets at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti.
The command now has about 3,000 U.S. personnel, Rodriguez said.
The command has seen some success in Somalia. In that easternmost coastal country, which presented a significant security concern to the U.S. in recent years, partnerships and training have weakened Al-Shabab and improved maritime security off Somalia’s coast to the point that no vessels were hijacked by pirates last year, Rodriguez said.
