DAKAR: Groups of Daesh (ISIS) fighters are quitting their bases in Libya fearing Western airstrikes and heading south, posing a new threat to countries in Africa’s Sahel region, including Niger and Chad, officials and intelligence sources said.
The ultra-hard-line movement that has seized large areas of Syria and neighboring Iraq has also amassed thousands of fighters along a coastal strip in Libya, where it has taken the city of Sirte and attacked oil infrastructure.
African and Western governments fear that the vast, lawless Sahel band to the south will become its next target, and say any large regional presence could be used as a springboard for wider attacks.
“ISIS are moving toward southern Libya to avoid the likely airstrikes from the European coalition,” said Col. Mahamane Laminou Sani, director of documentation and military intelligence for Niger’s armed forces.
“If something like that happens, the whole Sahel is [affected],” he added on the sidelines of the annual U.S.-led “Flintlock” counterterrorism exercises in Senegal.
The arid region stretching from the Sahara Desert to the Sudanian Savanna is already home to roving Al-Qaeda fighters who were scattered but not defeated by a 2012 French military intervention in Mali.
A closed-door seminar for senior military officials in Dakar this week organized as part of Flintlock is focusing on the militant challenge in northwest Africa which “is becoming more lethal, more complicated and more menacing,” according to a document handed to participants.
The U.S. military’s Africa Command is focused on combatting militancy and other threats, though it says it is rarely involved in fighting, and concentrates on training. It is headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany.
Niger and Chad are already grappling with incursions in the south from militants loyal to Nigeria’s Boko Haram, which is allied with Daesh.
A Western intelligence source on the sidelines of the conference said Daesh fighters had already entered Niger, although this could not be independently verified.
Chad, a Western military ally in the region which denounced NATO airstrikes in Libya in 2011 and opposes new ones, also expressed concern. “We are informing traditional and religious leaders in the north so they are prepared to prevent Daesh from coming into our territory,” said Col. Khassim Moussa, head of Chad’s Special Antiterrorism Group on the sidelines of the conference.
Checkpoints had been set up near the border, he added.
A resident in the Daesh stronghold of Sirte said Thursday that some districts were being evacuated and fighters were building defenses around the city amid fears of Western attacks.
U.S. and European officials say they are looking at ways to counter Daesh in Libya, including possible airstrikes, though officials say efforts could be held up by political turmoil in the OPEC member.
Laurence Aida Ammour, a consultant and Sahel security expert who briefed participants in Dakar, said airstrikes would cause a “mercury effect,” pushing Daesh fighters in various directions, including southwards like small globules of the element.
“If they go south then there’s a highway open to Niger, Chad, Burkina Faso and Benin,” she said, adding that only Libya’s powerful Misrata militias could stop them.
Col. Moussa said he expected NATO to help protect Chad’s northern border. “It’s them who got involved in Libya; it’s up to them to fix it.”
