US training forces in North Africa to disrupt next al Qaeda base

US Special Operations forces are training countries in North Africa in anti-terror operations because the region is becoming the new base of the al Qaeda network, The New York Times said Tuesday.
US military commanders at the US European Command in Stuttgart, Germany, told the daily newspaper that a largely ungoverned swath of territory stretching from the Horn of Africa to the Western Sahara's Atlantic coast was "a new Afghanistan."
Well-financed bands of militants are recruiting, training and arming themselves in the vast, arid region also known as Sahel.
The March 11 bombings in Madrid that killed 191 people, with their North African links, the official said, may presage other similar extremist attacks in Europe.
To tackle al Qaeda and associated groups in the region, the daily said, the United States has adopted a new approach: rather than a heavy American military presence, they are dispatching Special Operations forces to train soldiers and equip them with pickup trucks, radios and global-positioning systems.
"We want to be preventative, so that we don't have to put boots on the ground here in North Africa as we did in Afghanistan," said the European Command's chief of counter-terrorism, Lieutenant Colonel Powl Smith.
He said that by aiding local governments to do the fighting themselves, "we don't become a lightning rod for popular anger that radicals can capitalise on."
Launched after the September 11 attacks on the United States with an initial seven million dollars, the Pan-Sahel Initiative focused on Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Chad and is currently being expanded to Senegal and possibly other countries.
The European Command has asked for 125 million dollars for the region over five years, the daily said. The US officials said part of the strategy is to put the regional governments in touch with each other from their garrisons to co-ordinate their movements.
Geo-positioning equipment was allowing the creation of virtual garrisons in the sand and to locate water deposits and fuel depots, making local forces more efficient in their movements, they added. The strategy has already produced results with some al Qaeda linked militants chased out of Mali across Niger and into Chad, the officials said.