U.S. efforts to combat terrorists based on the African continent are running into a myriad of problems, perhaps none so vexing, or dangerous, as the constantly shifting alliances and aims of the terrorist fighters themselves.

No longer beholden to one group or ideology, or even to the highest bidder, these terror operatives are steadily blurring the lines dividing one group from another.

The result, according to Western and African defense and intelligence officials, is new type of higher-level terror operative, willing to work for competing, brand-name terror groups like al-Qaida and Islamic State, sometimes simultaneously.

“You need a bit of a decoder ring and you really have to keep up on it to figure out what one group of fighters is currently aligned with what other group,” Christopher Maier, director of the Defeat ISIS Core Task Force at the U.S. Defense Department, told VOA.

“They do mergers and acquisitions basically on a regular basis,” he said. “Most of the capability in terms of fighters and leaders moves as it serves their local interests.”

As a result, terror attacks can be harder to attribute, with successes at times possibly the result of help or planning from more than one group, even from both al-Qaida and IS.

Such attributions have even become the source of disagreements among U.S. counterterrorism agencies and officials.

Tunis attack

One example is the March 2015 attack on the Bardo Museum in Tunis that  killed 22 people.

U.S. defense and intelligence officials pinned responsibility on IS. Two months later, a U.S airstrike targeted a prime suspect, IS planner Noureddine Chouchane, a Tunisian national who had also been moving IS fighters through IS camps in Libya to other countries.

“Chouchane’s removal will eliminate an experienced facilitator and is expected to have an immediate impact on ISIL’s ability to facilitate its activities in Libya,” said then-Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook, using an acronym for Islamic State.

While Chouchane may have been the prime suspect, it was clear he was not working alone.

In the time since the strike targeting Chouchane, some U.S. officials came to believe he had help from another terror facilitator familiar to African counterterror officials, Wanas al-Faqih.

Only that was a problem. Whereas Chouchane was working for Islamic State, Faqih was known for his work for IS’s northern African rival, al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

“Wanas al-Faqih is an AQIM associate who planned the March 18, 2015, Bardo Museum attack in Tunis, Tunisia, that killed at least 20 people,” the State Department said in a statement this past January, when he was named as a specially designated terrorist.

U.S. counterterrorism officials outside the State Department quickly pushed back.

“The 18 March 2015 Bardo Museum attack in Tunis was conducted by ISIS-aligned Tunisians operating out of Sabratha, Libya,” a senior counterterrorism official told VOA.  “AQIM was not involved with planning the attack.”

Yet State Department officials insisted Faqih was involved, just that he was not acting on behalf of the al-Qaida affiliate.

“Wanas al-Faqih is dual-hatted,” a State Department counterterror official clarified to VOA. “He has worked for both AQ [al-Qaida] and ISIS.”

Fluid terror landscape

The terror landscape in Africa has always been fluid. Some counterterrorism officials have at times described various hot spots on the continent as jihadist resorts, where low-level fighters can rest and resupply before joining up with a new terror group.

Yet even as IS and al-Qaida compete for followers and affiliates, the willingness for higher-ranking jihadists to be “dual-hatted” has taken some by surprise, especially since it has long been discouraged at the very highest levels of both terror organizations.

“It’s been a long-evolving process,” said Joseph Siegle, director of research at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a U.S. Defense Department institution.

That has been especially true in parts Mali and Burkina Faso, where AQIM has been trying to expand since 2012, at one point taking major Malian cities like Kidal, Gao and Timbuktu with the help of seminomadic Tuareg rebels.

Despite that initial success, analysts say, AQIM was never able to solidify support among local jihadists.

“These groups are broken off, they re-form in different configurations, they change names,” said Siegle. “Sometimes there’s rivalry, sometimes there’s cooperation.”

And that fluidity extends up the chain of command.

“We see a lot of exchanges happening, either leaders going from one group to another or creating their own group when they’re not happy with the group they were in,” he said.

Problematic counterterror response

The constant state of flux on the ground has made the fight against the jihadist groups more difficult, both for African states and the U.S.

“Most people actually think that the threat is ended once you close them inside cells. That’s wrong,” Ambassador Mohamed Salah Tamek, delegate general of Morocco’s Penitentiary and Reintegration Administration, said during a visit to the U.S. late last year.

“The point is not to put these offenders in prison but rather convincing them to disengage from religious extremism,” he said, adding the key is not to take on the group or brand but rather the underlying thinking.

“These people are understanding religion differently,” Tamek said. “The religious discourse is misleading them, or they’re being misled by wrong ideas about jihad.”

For the United States, which has about 7,500 troops and contractors in Africa, the challenge is just as daunting, as evidenced by the October 2017 ambush of a U.S. team in Niger by an IS affiliate that left four Army Special Forces soldiers dead.

While a months-long investigation into the incident found the joint U.S.-Nigerien mission was plagued by problems up and down the chain of command, it also revealed a jihadist threat that was more vibrant and capable than previously thought.

Unseen magnitude, capability

“They knew activities went on there, but they had never seen anything in this magnitude — numbers, mobility and training,” General Thomas Waldhauser, commander of U.S. Africa Command, told Pentagon reporters earlier this month.

Since the ambush, U.S. Africa Command has not only increased the firepower available to its forces on the ground but also has ramped up its use of drones and other surveillance to get a better sense of the size and composition of the jihadist groups they are facing.

“ISIS-GS [Islamic State — Greater Sahel] is one of the many violent extremist groups in that particular region of the Mali-Niger border,” Waldhauser said. “They change allegiances quite frequently, because there’s underpinnings to AQIM and a group called JNIM, Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin.”

The fluid state of play is also forcing U.S. and African forces to put a greater premium on tracking individual leaders, like Doundou Chefou, currently a key player in the IS affiliate in Niger who was being targeted by U.S. and Nigerien forces at the time of the October 2017 ambush.

“These groups tend to combine around personalities and different, more localized interest,” the Defeat ISIS Core Task Force’s Maier told VOA.

The way they identify or brand themselves has increasingly less to do with ideology and more to do with pure convenience.

“Sometimes it behooves them more on what they’re trying to achieve to put the ISIS brand on them, much as in the past it was an al-Qaida-type brand,” Maier added. “Opportunistic is kind of how we tend to think of those groups down there.”

VOA’s Carol Guensburg contributed to this report.
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The World Health Organization (WHO) says people diagnosed with Ebola must be kept isolated to prevent the spread of the highly contagious disease. The WHO has updated the number of Ebola cases since the outbreak started in the Democratic Republic of Congo on May 8, confirming 31 of 52 probable and suspected cases, including 22 deaths.

The escape of two Ebola patients earlier this week from a treatment center in Mbandaka, a city of more than one million people, has raised fears of a rapid spread of the disease. The families of the patients reportedly helped them leave.

World Health Organization spokesman Tarik Jasarevic called the incident very unfortunate, but not unexpected.

“It is only human that people want to be with their loved ones and family want them to be at home in what could be the last moments of life,” he said.  “… Keeping a sick person at home not only decreases the chances of survival for this person, because this person is not receiving supportive treatment. It is also putting at risk the whole family.”

Ebola is highly contagious. The virus is transmitted through direct contact with infected bodily fluids. The fatality rate is between 20 percent and 90 percent.

Jasarevic said it is important to improve efforts to engage with communities so they understand how the virus is spread and how they can protect themselves from becoming infected.

“People who fall sick go to an isolation unit and receive treatment because that treatment will significantly increase their chances of survival,” he said. “…Getting IV fluids, getting antibiotics as a supportive means, if necessary, is something that reduces the risk of that.”

Jasarevic said it is important to trace every person who has come into contact with an Ebola patient. Those who have been identified are likely to receive an experimental vaccine that has shown good protective qualities, he added.

Since a vaccination campaign began on Monday, he said 154 people have been inoculated. They include high risk health workers and some particularly vulnerable people from local communities in Mbandaka.
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The U.N. special envoy for Burundi urged the African nation’s government Thursday to quickly restart dialogue with the opposition following a referendum that will allow the president to stay in power until 2034.

Michel Kafando told the Security Council Burundi can only solve the current political crisis through “an inclusive dialogue.” If this doesn’t happen, he warned, the opposition’s challenge to the referendum’s results “will further polarize an already tense political situation characterized by human rights violations and other abuses as well as the deterioration of its socio-economic and humanitarian situation.”

Burundi’s main opposition coalition asked the country’s constitutional court earlier Thursday to invalidate the results of last week’s referendum. The election commission on Monday said over 73 percent of the 4.7 million votes cast supported constitutional amendments, including one allowing President Pierre Nkurunziza to remain in power for 14 years after his current term ends in 2020.

The opposition coalition said the referendum was marred by intimidation and abuses. Before the vote, observers expressed alarm at reported violence and intimidation of the government’s perceived opponents, including threats of drowning and castration. A presidential decree criminalized calls to abstain from voting, with a penalty of up to three years in jail.

Kafando drew the Security Council’s attention to Burundi’s expulsion of experts from the U.N. Human Rights Council on April 26. Their visas were canceled while in Burundi and the U.N. envoy called on the government to facilitate their return. The government also suspended BBC and Voice of America broadcasts.

The constitutional court validated Nkurunziza’s third term in 2015, which the opposition and many international observers saw as unconstitutional. Months of deadly political turmoil followed, with more than 1,200 people killed and hundreds of thousands fleeing the country.

Kafando said the security situation is now “generally calm” though there are isolated grenade attacks and reports of bodies being discovered, some in military uniforms. He said the killing of 26 people, including women and children, on May 11 by unidentified armed men in Buganda showed that “the environment continues to be volatile.”

The council meeting demonstrated a sharp divide among its five veto-wielding permanent members over the referendum. France, Britain and the United States protested human rights violations and the government’s crackdown on the opposition and strongly backed Kafando’s call for an inclusive dialogue. Russia and China supported Burundi’s government.

French Ambassador Francois Delattre said the constitution’s revision goes against the Arusha accords adopted in 2000 to end a 13-year civil war in Burundi that killed about 300,000 people. He warned that mechanisms to protect the Tutsi minority in the Hutu-majority country “are weakened and will even disappear.”

Delattre said there has been no success in efforts to start a dialogue between the government and opposition, a push being made by the East African Community, which comprises six countries in the Great Lakes region — Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda.

“Nonetheless, the priority should remain a genuine, inclusive national dialogue without any conditions,” the ambassador said.

U.S. deputy political coordinator Elaine French echoed the call for talks with the opposition, saying the referendum further aggravates “acute political tensions.” Its results “leave us concerned that Burundi is moving closer to one-party rule,” she said.

Britain’s political coordinator, Stephen Hickey, also urged Burundi’s government to pursue an inclusive dialogue and preserve the Arusha accords. “The risks in Burundi are huge and the case for preventive diplomacy is overwhelming,” he said.

On the other side, Deputy Russian Ambassador Dmitry Polyansky called the referendum “strictly a domestic affair for Burundi.” He said the situation in the country doesn’t threaten regional or international peace and security and should therefore be taken off the council’s agenda.

Chinese Counselor Zhang Dianbin stressed Burundi’s sovereignty and said the referendum “fully proves the Burundi government and peoples’ ability to properly address relevant issues” and handle its own affairs.

Burundi’s U.N. ambassador, Albert Shingiro, called the referendum “a victim of its success” and sharply criticized unnamed countries that he said “propagated alarmist scenarios” before the vote.

He insisted the new constitution fully respects the Arusha agreement, “to which the government attaches great importance,” and guarantees democratic principles, national unity, protection of minorities, ethnic and gender quotas in institutions, and protection of human rights.
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Two dying Ebola patients were spirited out of a Congo hospital by their relatives on motorcycles, then taken to a prayer meeting with 50 other people, potentially exposing them all to the deadly virus, a senior aid worker said Thursday.

Both patients were vomiting and infectious and died hours after the prayer session in the river port city of Mbandaka, Dr. Jean-Clement Cabrol, emergency medical coordinator for Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), said.

Democratic Republic of Congo is racing to contain an outbreak of the disease, which spreads through contact with infected bodily fluids including vomit and sweat.

The Health Ministry said late Thursday that a new case had been confirmed in the town of Bikoro and another in the nearby village of Iboko, where the epidemic is thought to have started.

This brought the total number of confirmed cases to 31, it said in a statement, out of 52 suspected cases.

Ninth outbreak in Congo

Congo’s ninth recorded outbreak of the disease is thought to have killed at least 22 people so far, according to government figures released Wednesday, fewer than the last estimate of 27, after some of those deaths turned out not to be Ebola.

“The escape was organized by the families, with six motorcycles as the patients were very ill and couldn’t walk,” Cabrol told a news briefing in Geneva after returning from the affected region. “They were taken to a prayer room with 50 people to pray.

“They were found at two in the morning, one of them dead and one was dying. So that’s 50-60 contacts right there. The patients were in the active phase of the disease, vomiting.” The patients got out of the isolation ward Monday.

Earlier reports did not give details of the escape or where they went afterward. A third patient who left the ward survived.

Health officials started trying to trace the motorcycle drivers and other people who came into contact with the patients as soon as the escape was reported, Dr. Peter Salama, head of emergency response at the World Health Organization (WHO), told Reuters on Thursday.

“From the moment that they escaped, the (health) ministry, WHO and partners have been following very closely every contact,” he said.

‘Hard to predict’

WHO’s three-month budget for the crisis has been doubled to $57 million to carry out a complex operation in a remote, forested area, Salama said.

“All it takes is one sick person to travel down the Congo River and we can have outbreaks seeded in many different locations … that can happen at any moment. It’s very hard to predict,” he said, referring to the river linking the trading hub of Mbandaka to the capital Kinshasa, whose population is 10 million.

“It is going to be at least weeks and more likely months before we get this outbreak fully under control,” Salama said.

There have been major advances in medical treatment of the virus since it ravaged West Africa in 2014-2016, including the use of an experimental vaccine to protect medical staff.

But local skepticism about the dangers and the need to isolate infected patients continue to complicate efforts to contain it. In past outbreaks, mourning relatives have caught the hemorrhagic disease by touching the highly contagious bodies of dead loved ones, sometimes by laying hands on them to say goodbye. 
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