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US Scrambles to Contain Growing ISIS Threat in Libya
New York Times-Feb 21, 2016
THIES, Senegal — The Islamic State's branch in Libya is deepening its reach across a wide area of Africa, attracting new recruits from countries ...
The Real News Network-Feb 24, 2016
Libyan Troops Attack ISIS on the Ground
Footage released by Libya Armed Forces Media shows Libyan troops fighting against Islamist rebels in Benghazi.
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS on Publish Date February 22, 2016.
Photo by Associated Press.
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THIES, Senegal — The Islamic State’s branch in Libya
is deepening its reach across a wide area of Africa, attracting new
recruits from countries like Senegal that had been largely immune to the
jihadist propaganda — and forcing the African authorities and their
Western allies to increase efforts to combat the fast-moving threat.
The American airstrikes in northwestern Libya
on Friday, which demolished an Islamic State training camp and were
aimed at a top Tunisian operative, underscore the problem, Western
officials said. The more than three dozen suspected Islamic State
fighters killed in the bombing were recruited from Tunisia and other
African countries, officials said, and were believed to be rehearsing an
attack against Western targets.
Even
as American intelligence agencies say the number of Islamic State
fighters in Iraq and Syria has dropped to about 25,000 from a high of
about 31,500, partly because of the United States-led air campaign
there, the group’s ranks in Libya have roughly doubled in the same
period, to about 6,500 fighters. More than a dozen American and allied
officials spoke of their growing concern about the militant
organization’s expanding reach from Libya and across Africa on rules of
anonymity because the discussions involved intelligence and military
planning.
Islamic
State leaders in Syria are telling recruits traveling north from West
African nations like Senegal and Chad, as well as others streaming up
through Sudan in eastern Africa, not to press on to the Middle East.
Instead, they are being told to stay put in Libya. American intelligence
officials, who described the recent orders from Islamic State leaders,
say the organization’s immediate goal is to carve out a new caliphate in
Libya, and there are signs the affiliate is trying to establish
statelike institutions there.
“Libya
has become a magnet for individuals not only inside of Libya, but from
the African continent as well as from outside,” John O. Brennan, the
director of the C.I.A., told a Senate panel this month.
The
rising threat from Libya comes as President Obama is being asked by
many of his top military and intelligence advisers to approve the
broader use of American military force in Libya to open another front
against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.
While
administration officials have disclosed that Mr. Obama is mulling over
how large of a military campaign to order for Libya, the new
intelligence reports and the analysis on the spread of the Islamic State
are energizing the high-level debate in Washington and allied capitals.
“The
jihadist threat emanating from Syria and Iraq cannot be defused without
addressing the growing danger posed by the terror groups’
co-conspirators in Libya,” Representative Devin Nunes, a California
Republican who heads the House Intelligence Committee, said Friday.
Before
resorting to any wider military action, however, the White House and
Western allies like Britain, Italy and France are trying to help create a
unity government in Libya. The goal is to use such a new central
authority to rally dozens of fractious militias to fight against a
common enemy — the Islamic State. American and European Special
Operations forces could help advise and assist those militias, officials
said.
“Our
strong preference, as has always been the case, is to train Libyans to
fight,” Mr. Obama said last week at a news conference in California.
“There’s a whole bunch of constituencies who are hardened fighters and
don’t ascribe to ISIS or their perverted ideology. But they have to be organized and can’t be fighting each other.”
As
a result, the administration and its allies are taking several steps to
prepare to train Libyan troops, should a newly formed unity government
request such aid. They are also rushing to bolster pivotal African
allies outside of Libya as a bulwark against Islamic State expansion on
the continent.
The
Pentagon has proposed spending $200 million this year to help train and
equip the armies and security forces of North and West African
countries. The United States is about to break ground on a new $50
million drone base in Agadez, Niger, that will allow Reaper surveillance
aircraft to fly hundreds of miles closer to southern Libya.
Col.
Mahamane Laminou Sani, Niger’s top intelligence officer, said in an
interview that his country had increased its border patrols against the
threat in neighboring Libya, and French troops stationed in Niger’s far
north are doing the same.
“It’s
a global threat that is not restricted by borders,” said Lt. Col.
Moussa Mboup, a Senegalese Army operations officer who had trained in
the United States and France. He spoke here during the Pentagon’s annual
Flintlock military exercise with 1,800 African troops, United States
Army Special Forces and other Western commando trainers, which ends
later this month.
The
Islamic State in Libya is now the most dangerous of the group’s eight
affiliates, counterterrorism officials say. About half a dozen senior
Islamic State lieutenants have arrived from Syria in recent months to
build up the franchise, these officials say.
New
United States and allied intelligence assessments say that Islamic
State commanders in Libya are seizing territory there, starting to tax
its residents and setting up quasi-government institutions — mirroring
the Islamic State playbook in Syria and Iraq.
“They’re
trying to establish a statewide structure,” Brett McGurk, Mr. Obama’s
envoy to the United States-led coalition fighting the Islamic State,
told American lawmakers this month.
The
militant group is also starting to move in on the lucrative African
migrant-smuggling operations that have been thriving in lawless Libya,
developing a new source of revenue for the terror group.
American
officials caution that while the Islamic State’s Libya branch is trying
to act like its parent organization in Syria, the affiliate faces some
inherent limitations.
The
Libya branch, unlike its Syria headquarters, does not control any oil
fields that can generate revenue, although it has attacked some of the
fields in eastern Libya.
The
banks the franchise has seized in its stronghold of Surt were not as
flush as the banks in Mosul — having around $500 million, by some
accounts — when the Islamic State conquered that northern Iraqi city in
2014.
American
officials say the main source of revenue for the Libya branch is
taxation and extorting fees from residents who live or businesses that
operate in the 150-mile swath of territory they control in and around
Surt.
The
Islamic State in Libya is swelling its ranks through one of the main
means its parent in Syria uses: a savvy social media campaign aimed at
enticing disaffected young people who are facing few education options
and bleak economic futures in their countries.
Indeed,
intelligence officials said there was emerging evidence that the
Islamic State had turned to its affiliate in Nigeria — the Islamic
militant organization called Boko Haram, which was formerly aligned with
Al Qaeda
— to poach young commanders and fighters from Al Qaeda’s affiliate in
northwest Africa and from its Shabab franchise in Somalia.
Previous
attempts by senior Islamic State leaders to reach out directly to those
Qaeda groups received the silent treatment, the officials said. But the
new approach, while still in its early stages, seems to be gaining
traction.
The
Senegalese authorities recently reported that 30 men had gone to Libya
to fight with the Islamic State there, trends that officials in Niger,
Nigeria and Mali have also noticed.
As
the Islamic State pushes closer to some of the poorer countries of the
Sahel region, like Niger and Mauritania, the authorities here believe
there will be no shortage of unemployed young men who are eager to join
the fight.
To
help fight that trend, Special Forces from 30 African and Western
countries are participating in a three-week counterterrorism training
exercise here on this sprawling army encampment 35 miles outside Dakar
that is also home to Senegal’s military academy.
On
several shooting ranges, dotted with massive baobab trees, American,
Canadian, Dutch and Belgian trainers worked with soldiers from Niger and
Nigeria.
Some
troops were practicing first aid; others were shooting at close-range
targets. The Belgians were leading a more difficult training exercise in
which the African soldiers approached fortified targets from afar, and
then assaulted the targets from several different directions — as they
would in an actual raid.
With
help from Dutch Marines and American Special Forces, Senegal is also
training a new force to patrol its watery northern border with
Mauritania, and it is deploying troops to neighboring Mali to help a
United Nations force stymie Qaeda and other militant fighters there.
“ISIS
is spreading even to here,” said Col. Guirane Ndiaye, a Senegalese zone
commander. “If we do not have a multinational effort, ISIS will spread
even more.”
Dionne Searcey and Sergey Ponomarev contributed reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on February 22, 2016, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. Scrambles to Beat Back ISIS in Libya.
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