Al-Qaeda involvement in Africa

Al-Qaeda has conducted operations and recruited members in Africa. It has included a number of bombing attacks in North Africa and supporting parties in civil wars in Eritrea and Somalia. From 1991 to 1996, Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders were based in Sudan.

An insurgency is being waged by the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (which is called today as the al-Qaeda Organization in the Islamic Maghreb) against the Algerian government. It is a spin-off to the Algerian Civil War that ended in 2002, and has been linked to bombings in , Batna and Dellys in 2007.

The group has declared its intention to attack Algerian, French, American and Spanish targets. It has been designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the U.S. Department of State, and similarly classed as a terrorist organization by the European Union.

As soon as the allied Somali and Ethiopian forces drove the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) out of Somalia in January 2007, U.S. accused Eritrea of providing safe haven for some of their leadership. America also condemned Eritrea since it continued to "fund, arm, train and advise the insurgents" attacking the Somalia government. According to a regional Somali government, some Eritrean soldiers were also sighted working with Arab and al-Qaeda fighters against the Somalian government, and the foreign alliance attacked government positions.

In 2007 there were reports that the Eritrean government is sheltering the leadership of the insurgency in Somalia. The United Nations continued to report of Eritrean assistance to Somalis with alleged links to al-Qaeda. Accordingly, the UN Security Council said that Eritrea has secretly supplied "huge quantities of arms" to a Somali insurgent group with alleged ties to al Qaeda, in violation of an international arms embargo and despite the deployment of African peacekeepers" adding that it has been "provided to the al-Shabaab (an extremist group which emerged within the ICU’s armed forces and is led by a kinsman and protégé of the ICU council leader Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, Aden Hashi Farah "Eyrow", who trained in Afghanistan with al-Qaeda before returning to Somalia after 9/11) by and through Eritrea" since December 2006. Sheikh Aweys himself and other members of the Islamic Courts Union who are wanted by the U.S. over suspected links to al-Qaeda (the UN has Sheikh Aweys on a list of individuals "belonging to or associated with" al Qaeda, which he denies) organized a congress in Eritrea to strengthen their militant opposition to the Somalia transitional government.

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Wikipedia