Islam Struggles For Unity and Independence From The West

Since the Ottoman Empire’s collapse in the First World War, Arab Islamic civilization has been deep in a crisis that can only be resolved from within. Its character is both political and religious and might be compared with the Thirty Years’ War in Europe that ended in 1648 in the Westphalian Settlement, which created a new international system of national sovereignties and, in religion, acceptance of the Augsburg principle (1555) of cuius regio, eius religio. Roughly speaking, these terms have prevailed in the West to the present day, notwithstanding a sinister 20th-century totalitarian interlude.

The unexpected appearance of what claims to be the new Islamic Caliphate—sweeping all before it, its atrocities demonstrating its power and ruthlessness, its avowed destiny the restoration of an Islamic Golden Age—should not be seen as anything new in imperialist and post-imperialist history. 

It is astonishing that the debate in Western circles on what (or what not) to do about ISIS has seemed largely innocent of history and indifferent to the pattern of consistent futility and failure in the West’s efforts to impose its will on the non-Western world. 

A new movement that claims to restore the lost power and glories of Islam, is actually the ultimate stage in the crisis that has afflicted the Arab Muslim civilization since its loss of unity in the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, the last political manifestation of a united Islam.

One is constantly told that history must be consulted in order to understand the present, but in practice that rarely is done with an open mind.

The rise of a radical popular movement demanding that a lost golden age be restored to a fragmented and culturally distraught society occurred at least twice in 19th-century China (the Taiping and Boxer rebellions) and in colonial India (the so-called Sepoy Mutiny) and Sudan (with the Mahdi Mohamed Ahmed, to take only the best known instances of such uprisings against imperial powers.

The phenomenon has appeared in post-colonial Africa: what else is the terrible Lord’s Resistance Army of children in Uganda, or other radical movements such as Boko Haram, classified in Western capitals as merely “terrorist”? Their power lies in that they are motivated by versions or perversions of religion.

All are political expressions of probably the most important recurrent phenomenon of history itself: the search for the key to the Millennium, common to sophisticated as well as simple societies throughout history. What do people think Communism was, and in fragmented forms remains today? It proposed a method for engineering what Communists—the Comintern and the Soviet and other governments—promised, and indeed believed: the coming of the Great Day when virtue incarnate would manifest itself in a transformed future condition of permanent happiness conferring justice and happiness upon an afflicted people. It is secular religion.

This is a modern phenomenon. In the West during the medieval Age of Religion the promised paradise was held to exist outside of time and would only be opened at the end of the dolor of earthly existence by the arrival of the Messiah. The Millennium marked the end of secular time, when human history would have run its course and the “Thousand Years” of heavenly reign begun—as promised in the Book of Revelation. 

Marxism was the secular translation of that religious promise, promulgated by the new prophets: Marx himself, Engels, Mao Tse-tung. A secularized prophecy was necessary because God had been assassinated in the European Enlightenment.

The contemporary crisis of the Arabs began following the Great War when the winners, the principal European imperial powers of the time, disposed of the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, using their new instrument, the League of Nations, to issue mandates of supervisory control over the new monarchies and other territorial authorities recognized in the war settlements. The quest nonetheless persisted to reunite the people of Islam, united by the Koran and by the Arabic language in which the Koran was written and still is read.

The Ottoman system that had replaced the great Arab Caliphates was destroyed in the 19th and early 20th century by resistance within the Slavic European parts of the empire and then by the collision of the Ottomans with modern, industrial Europe in the World War. 

Following 1918, ageless, Islamic but non-Arab Egypt remained a monarchy, but under British “protection.” Persia, also non-Arab, another ancient independent monarchy, had fallen under an informal British ascendancy after the discovery there of oil to fuel the Royal Navy. Syria, Iraq, and Transjordan had Hashemite Arab monarchs bestowed upon them—Iraq to be ruled by Faisal, who had led the “Arab Revolt” with T.E. Lawrence as his British military counselor, and who was initially made king of Syria until displaced by the French colonial authorities.

Syria and Transjordan were made mandated states by the League of Nations, respectively under French and British control. Palestine—as everyone knows—was also placed under British Mandate but with no provision made for fulfilling Britain’s wartime promise to establish a Jewish National Home there (on condition, as the Balfour Declaration specified, that the rights of the existing non-Jewish communities of Palestine would be respected).

What at the time was tribal Arabia was in the course of being conquered by Ibn Saud, his conquered territories being proclaimed independent “Saudi Arabia” in 1932, while present-day Yemen remained under tribal rule.

The European colonial governments were accustomed to rule “lesser” peoples beyond Europe’s frontiers and beyond the seas in what they considered to be their subjects’ as well as their own best interests. Now they did so under the unimpeachable authority of the “international community,” as the League of Nations would be considered today, destroying the expectation the Arab peoples had of unity and genuine independence.

The new monarchies in Iraq and Syria fell to nationalist or military movements in the 1920s and 1930s. The modernizing and secular pan-Arab Baath party eventually took power in both countries. The closest thing to the pan-Arab ideal—an “Arab Nation”—was achieved after 1953 by Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser, who introduced “Arab Socialism” into Arab politics and achieved ephemeral unions of Egypt with Syria and Yemen. 

Three decades after the Great War’s armistice, the newly created United Nations, a Western institution dominated (as still is the case) by the United States, partitioned British Mandated Palestine in order to establish the Jewish National Home promised in the British government’s Balfour Declaration of November 1917, thus creating a permanent conflict with the Palestinian possessors of the land. Since then there has been a constant struggle between American-backed Zionists and the existing Arab occupants of Palestine. 

This has inflicted a politico-psychical transformation upon the general Arab consciousness, reanimating the sensibilities of the Crusades, the great Caliphates, and the Ottoman period when Muslims ruled Balkan Europe from Greece to Vienna. 

On both sides, the Palestinian conflict has acquired the quality—to borrow the adjective contrived by Israeli politicians—of an “existential” struggle. Death to the loser.

In this political climate of Arab national failure and, as it seemed, irresolvable Israel-Palestinian conflict, the United States determined that it was capable of imposing a new order. This had been implicit in America’s overall wartime and postwar world policy. 

There were two foreign-policy objectives to achieve in the Middle East: 

The first was to assure American access to energy supplies. This had been done in a wartime agreement between Franklin Roosevelt and Arabia’s Ibn Saud, directly exchanging permanent access to Saudi oil for permanent U.S. protection. 

The second was to find an Arab-Israeli solution. Had Washington been willing to impose one in the 1950s—the creation of two permanent states underwritten by the United States—the region would have been spared 60 years of war, open and covert. That was not done. 

Israel was eventually confirmed in its impulse to possess all of the Holy Land, at whatever cost to the Palestinians, initially dismissed in Israeli propaganda discourse as an insignificant body of wandering tribesmen. 

A permanent obstacle to American regional success arose in Iran in 1951, when a popularly elected populist prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, nationalized British oil interests against the will of the Shah. The Shah fled. But in 1953, a coup overthrowing the prime minister by street agitation, mustered by British and American intelligence agencies, restored the Shah. The Nixon administration later anointed him America’s ally and order-keeper in the Gulf region. However in 1979, after another period of internal disorder, he was forced to flee a Shia fundamentalist religious coup d’état, which included capture and internment of the U.S. Embassy staff and humiliation of the United States government. This produced the enmity towards Iran that has motivated American policy ever since.

The major result was Iraq’s subsequent attack on Iran, concerning territorial issues, which enjoyed unspoken American support. The war lasted eight years, and its savagery has been compared with that of the First World War. In 1990 Iraq invaded Kuwait—another territorial claim—and a U.S.-led coalition liberated Kuwait and its oil in the so-called Gulf War. The United States then resolved to keep permanent bases in Saudi Arabia, despite Saudi objection to the presence of such installations near the Muslim holy places. 

After its 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, the al-Qaeda movement, explicitly stated that its motive had been to impose God’s wrath upon the blasphemies of the United States in the Middle East. President George W. Bush reciprocated with his assertion that the jihadists of al-Qaeda embodied Evil.

The American invasions of Afghanistan and Arab Iraq were animated by revenge for the 9/11 attacks and rationalized by a fiction about nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and by the self-serving American chimera of “democratizing” those two societies and eventually the rest of the region’s Arab and Central Asian Islamic states—assumed to be candidates for integration into a Washington-dominated liberal regional system.

The “New Middle East,” officially proclaimed by NATO at the end of 2003, has conspicuously failed to appear, but it remains a goal of the expansionist neoconservative visionaries among the makers of American policy. 

In Bush’s government, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice wrote in Foreign Affairs in 2008, “Democratic state-building is now an urgent component in our national interest” reflecting a “uniquely American realism” teaching that it is America’s job “to change the world,” and in its own image. 

President Obama has declared that the jihadism of the new “Islamic State” is itself an incarnation of evil that must be deterred and destroyed. 

The two sides in this renewal of George W. Bush’s War Against Global Terror—Jews and Christians in the West and their Arab enemies—both consider themselves “people of the Book” and descendants of the Prophet Abraham. They have now become in their own minds actors in the apocalyptic destiny described in the Book of Revelation. 

Many American Evangelical Protestants have convinced themselves that contemporary American foreign policy can only be understood in such a context.

Obstacles to success in Washington’s renewal of war in the Middle East are that the American political model is no longer widely convincing or respected in the region; quite the opposite is true. 

Moreover, Washington’s conduct since 2001 has undermined or deliberately subverted institutions of international order to which, in the past, the United States was a leading contributor. 

The codes of international justice and morality, developed in the Western community of nations since the 17th century, have when expedient been disregarded or rejected, with demands that the United States be exempted from the jurisdiction of international law and even from what until recently were accepted norms of international morality concerning human rights and national sovereignty.

Thus the foreign policies of the United States have been stripped of a vital part of their assumed original moral content. 

An assimilation of modern totalitarian influences, values, and practices occurred in the United States after 2001, with state assassinations, selective drone killings, disregard of due process, torture, and permanent incarceration without trial justified by American leaders in their conduct of what has amounted to a war, not really of religions, as such, but between absolutisms, the one religious, and the other, ours, a political culture of extreme and solipsistic millenarian nationalism.

One recalls the theory Samuel Huntington announced late in his career that the “next world war” would be a war of religions rather than states. The present writer dismissed this at the time as a simple projection into the future of 20th century experience and the conventional American foreign-policy thinking of the 1990s, notably that promoted by the aggressively anti-Islamic Washington neoconservatives.

The theory’s implausibility was augmented by its argument that China (regarded in Washington, then as seemingly even now, as a future enemy) was to be part of a “Confucian-Islamic military connection… to counter the military power of the West”—an alliance, if it were indeed to exist, one would think of no great use to China, a nation with a scattered and ill-treated Muslim minority of less than 3 percent of its population and little to gain from involving itself in Muslim conflicts with Washington.

The main effect of the Huntington thesis at the time it was promoted in the United States was to increase anti-Arab prejudices, especially among friends of Israel. It contributed to a climate among policymakers that made the Bush administration’s vengeance for the 9/11 attacks seem an inevitability. 

It had an even more significant influence in Islamic intellectual and ideological circles and among Arab governments because of its Harvard provenance, the eminence of Professor Huntington himself, considered the dean of the American academic specialty of political science (which emerged in the 1930s out of the behaviorist movement) and for years a leading academic influence on Washington policy-making. Was he proposing a Western attack against the Muslim world? 

While Chinese-Arab military alliance seems hardly a threat today, the Huntington thesis of a new religious war has been taken seriously in some quarters since the 9/11 attacks. 

In 2014, within days of the proclamation of the new Islamic State, the new Caliphate, the drumbeat demand had begun in congressional and think-tank Washington for an attack upon ISIS (or ISIL, or the new Arab Caliphate, or in Arabic DAESH, as it is variously known), together with criticism of Barack Obama for his initial reluctance to act. 

But why? The previous interventions in the Middle East have proven futile and damaging to both sides. 

Americans have attempted to make themselves oligarchs of the modern Arab Islamic world, introducing invasions and wars whose actual effect has been to envenom an immense part of the Arabs of the Middle East and validate the vengeance they and their leaders have sought to inflict on us. 

This is a war essentially within Islamic civilization, with religious, ideological, and political causes sprung from inside that society, as well as from the external provocations it has endured.

It can only be settled by the people of that civilization. Another foreign military intervention is the last thing it needs. 

The first of the post-1918 imperial interventions by Britain and France shattered Islamic unity as it had existed in the late Ottoman period when the Sublime Porte was a major European as well as Mediterranean power. The major nations parceled the region up until after the Second World War, when successive Arab efforts to recreate the visionary ideal of the Arab Nation were thwarted.

The American attempt to make the Shah of Iran its plenipotentiary and his state the agent of American power in the Middle East ended in provoking a fundamentalist Iran that became the most important American enemy in the region. 

The American invasions of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and Sunni-ruled Iraq turned both into ruined and corrupt puppet regimes. 

One might think any new American strategy to reform the Middle East would universally be regarded as folly, even in Washington. 

What the previous attempts accomplished was destruction and the generation of seething hatred of the United States in much of the Islamic world. 

Washington has now appointed itself leader of still another and predictably unsuccessful military intervention, in which tens or hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, if this continues, may eventually die.

By joining the United States in a coalition to battle the New Caliphate, Saudi Arabia and the rest of its Arab members have once again announced their dependence upon a foreign and interventionist power to defend their own integrity, an admission of impotence to restore to the Arab Islamic world the wholeness and integrity it possessed during the Ottoman period, a confirmation of their capitulation to partition and imperialism in the 20th century, as well as their unwillingness or inability to restore the unity of the past Islamic civilization.

William Pfaff

Boko Haram A Blessing For Imperialism In Africa:

The Americans now admit they are training battalions of African Rangers and counterinsurgency troops. The next step is the proliferation of death squads in West Africa, as the U.S. did in Southeast Asia and Latin America. Nigeria’s schoolgirls may or may not be rescued, but U.S. and European “humanitarian” military interventionists have already gained more than they could have imagined.

“NATO’s aggression against Libya begat the sub-Saharan chaos that justified the French and U.S. occupation of Mali and Niger.”

Militarily, Africa is fast becoming an American continent. Barack Obama, who has been president for all but the first year of AFRICOM’s existence, has succeeded in integrating U.S. fighting units, bases, training regimens, equipment and financing into the military structures of all but a handful of African nations. The great pan-Africanist and former Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah’s dream of a militarily united Africa has been all but realized – with Americans and Europeans in charge. Under the guise of “humanitarian” intervention, Obama has vastly expanded Bill Clinton and George Bush’s African footprints, so that only a few patches on the continental map lie outside Washington’s sphere of operations. Eritrea and Zimbabwe are the notable exceptions – and, therefore, future targets.

Africa is occupied territory. The African Union doesn’t even pretend to be in charge of its own nominal peace-keeping missions, which are little more than opportunities for African militaries to get paid for doing the West’s bidding. China and Brazil may be garnering the lion’s share of trade with Africa, but the men with the guns are loyal to AFRICOM – the sugar daddy to the continent’s military class. U.S. troops now sleep in African barracks, brothers in arms with African officers who can determine who will sleep next week in the presidential mansion.

The pace of U.S. penetration of West Africa has quickened dramatically since 2011, when Obama bombed Muammar Gaddafi’s Libyan government out of existence, setting a flood of jihadists and weapons streaming east to Syria and south to destabilize the nations of the Sahel. Chaos ensued – beautiful chaos, if you are a U.S. military planner seeking justification for ever-larger missions. NATO’s aggression against Libya begat the sub-Saharan chaos that justified the French and U.S. occupation of Mali and Niger. Hyperactive North African jihadists, empowered by American bombs, weapons and money, trained and outfitted their brethren on the continent, including elements of Nigeria’s Boko Haram. The Hausa-speaking Islamic warriors then bequeathed AFRICOM a priceless gift: nearly 300 schoolgirls in need of rescuing, perfect fodder for “humanitarian” intervention.

Nobody had to ask twice that Obama “Do something!”

The heads of Nigeria, Chad, Niger, Benin and Cameroon were summoned to Paris (pretending it was their idea) where they declared “total war” on Boko Haram, as “observers” from the U.S., France, Britain and the European Union (Africa’s past and future stakeholders) looked on. French President Francois Hollande said “a global and regional action plan” would come out of the conference.

“The heads of Nigeria, Chad, Niger, Benin and Cameroon were summoned to Paris where they declared ‘total war’ on Boko Haram.”

Of course, the five African states have neither the money, training, equipment nor intelligence gathering capacity for such a plan. It will be a Euro-American plan for the defense and security of West Africa – against other Africans. Immediately, the U.S. sent 80 troops to Chad (whose military has long been a mercenary asset of France) to open up a new drone base, joining previously existing U.S. drone fields in Niger, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Somalia, the Seychelles Islands, Djibouti (home to a huge French and American base), and CIA sites that need not be disclosed.

The new West African security grouping became an instant imprint of NATO, an appendage to be shaped by imperial military planners to confront enemies chosen by Washington and Paris.

What a miracle of humanitarian military momentum! The girls had only been missing for a month, and might not be rescued alive, but five neighboring African countries – one of them the biggest economy on the continent – had already been dragooned into a NATO-dominated military alliance with other subordinate African states.

It soon turned out that AFRICOM already had a special relationship with the Nigerian military that was not announced until after the schoolgirls’ abduction. AFRICOM will train a battalion of Nigerian Rangers in counterinsurgency warfare, the first time that the Command has provided “full spectrum” training to Africans on such a scale.

With the American public in a “Save our girls” interventionist frame of mind, operations that were secret suddenly became public. The New York Times reveals that the U.S. has been running a secret program to train counterterrorism battalions for Niger and Mauritania. Elite Green Berets and Delta Force killers are instructing handpicked commandos in counterinsurgency in Mali, as well. The identity of one Times source leaves little doubt that the previously secret operations are designed to blanket the region with U.S. trained death squads. Michael Sheehan was until last year in charge of Special Operations at the Pentagon – Death Squads Central – where he pushed for more Special Ops trainers for African armies. Sheehan now holds the “distinguished chair” at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center. In the 1980s, he was a Special Forces commander in Latin America – which can only mean death squads.

“AFRICOM will train a battalion of Nigerian Rangers in counterinsurgency warfare.”

U.S. Army Special Forces have always been political killers, most often operating with the CIA. The Phoenix Program, in Vietnam, which murdered between 26,000 and 41,000 people and tortured many more, was a CIA-Special Forces war crime. From 1975 to deep into the 80s, the CIA and its Special Forces muscle provided technical support and weapons to killers for Operation Condor, the death squads run by a consortium of military governments in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil, believed responsible for 60,000 murders. Sheehan was probably involved in Operation Condor and its Central American component, Operation Charly, and has perfected the art of political murder, ever since. If he is happy and feeling vindicated by events in Africa, then U.S.-trained death squads are about to proliferate in that part of the world.

There is no question that Obama is enamored of Special Ops, since small unit murders by professional killers at midnight look less like war – and can, if convenient, be blamed on (other) “terrorists.” However, history – recent history – proves the U.S. can get away with almost limitless carnage in Africa. Ethiopia’s 2006 invasion of Somalia, backed by U.S. forces on land, air and sea, resulted in “the worst humanitarian crisis in Africa” at the time, “worse than Darfur,” according to UN observers, with hundreds of thousands dead. The U.S. then withheld food aid to starve out Somali Shabaab fighters, leading to even more catastrophic loss of life. But, most Americans are oblivious to such crimes againstBlack humanity.

U.S. ally Ethiopia commits genocide against ethnic Somalis in its Ogaden region with absolute impunity, and bars the international media from the region. Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama – each of them with help from Susan Rice – have collectively killed six million Congolese since 1996. The greatest genocide since World War Two was the premeditated result of the chaos deliberately imposed on mineral-rich Congo by the U.S. and its henchmen in neighboring Rwanda and Uganda. Paul Kagame, the current leader of Rwanda, shot down a plane with two presidents aboard in 1994, sparking the mass killings that brought Kagame to power and started neighboring Congo on the road to hell. America celebrates Kagame as a hero, although the Tutsi tribal dictator sends death squads all over the world to snuff out those who oppose him.

“The U.S. can get away with almost limitless carnage in Africa.”

Ugandan leader Yoweri Museveni, a friend of the U.S. since Ronald Reagan, committed genocidal acts against his rivals from the Acholi tribe, throwing them into concentration camps. Joseph Kony was one of these Acholis, who apparently went crazy. Kony hasn’t been a threat to Uganda or any other country in the region for years, but President Obama used a supposed sighting of remnants of his Lords Resistance Army to send 100 Green Berets to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Rwanda, the Central African Republic, and South Sudan. Just last month, Obama sent 150 more troops and four aircraft to central Africa, again claiming that Kony was lurking, somewhere.

Actually, the American troops were deployed near South Sudan, which the U.S, Britain and Israel had destabilized for decades in an effort to split it off from the larger nation of Sudan. South Sudan became independent, but it remained unstable – not a nation, but a place with oil that the U.S. coveted. Many tens of thousands more are certain to die in fighting in South Sudan, but few Americans will blame their own country.

As the carnage in Congo demonstrates, whole populations can be made to disappear in Africa without most people in the West noticing. The death squads the Americans are training in Nigeria, Niger, Mauretania and Mali, and those that will soon be stalking victims in Cameroon and Benin, will not be limited to hunting Boko Haram. Death squads are, by definition, destabilizing; they poison the political and social environment beyond repair, as Central Americans who lived through the 80s can attest.

Yet, that is U.S. imperialism’s preferred method of conquest in the non-white world. It’s what the Americans actually do, when folks demand that they “Do something.”

By Glen Ford 

Lion Of The Desert (Omar Mukhtar)

Starring: Anthony Quinn, Oliver Reed, Irene Papas, Rod Steiger, Raf Vallone, John Gielgud.

Omar Mukhtar (Arabic: عمر المختار Omar Al-Mukhtār) (20 August 1858 – 16 September 1931), of the Mnifa, was born in the small village of Janzour, near Tobruk in eastern Barqa (Cyrenaica) in Libya. Beginning in 1912, he organized and, for nearly twenty years, led native resistance to Italian colonization of Libya. Italian armed forces captured and hanged him in 1931.

Italian Invasion:
In October 1911, during the Italo-Turkish War, an Italian naval contingent under the command of Admiral Luigi Faravelli reached the shores of Libya, then a territory subject to Ottoman Turkish control. The admiral demanded that the Turkish administration and garrison surrender their territory to the Italians or incur the immediate destruction of the city of Tripoli and Benghazi. The Turks and their Libyan allies withdrew to the countryside instead of surrendering, and the Italians bombarded the cities for three days, then proclaimed the Tripolitanians to be "committed and strongly bound to Italy." This marked the beginning of a series of battles between the Italian colonial forces and the Libyan armed opposition in the East of Libya (Cyrenaica) under Omar Mukhtar for 22 years

Guerrilla Warfare:
A teacher of the Qur'an by profession, Mukhtar was also skilled in the strategies and tactics of desert warfare. He knew local geography well and used that knowledge to advantage in battles against the Italians, who were unaccustomed to desert warfare. Mukhtar repeatedly led his small, highly alert groups in successful attacks against the Italians, after which they would fade back into the desert terrain. Mukhtar’s men skillfully attacked outposts, ambushed troops, and cut lines of supply and communication. The Italian army was left astonished and embarrassed by his guerrilla tactics.

In the mountainous region of Ghebel Akhdar ("Green Mountain") in 1924, Italian Governor Ernesto Bombelli created a counter-guerrilla force that inflicted a severe setback to rebel forces in April 1925. Mukhtar then quickly modified his own tactics and was able to count on continued help from Egypt. In March, 1927, despite occupation of Giarabub from February 1926 and increasingly stringent rule under Governor Attilio Teruzzi, Mukhtar surprised Italian troops at Raheiba. Between 1927 and 1928, Mukhtar reorganized the Senusite forces, who were being hunted constantly by the Italians. Even General Teruzzi recognized Omar's qualities of "exceptional perseverance and strong will power."

Pietro Badoglio, governor of Libya from January 1929, after extensive negotiations concluded a compromise with Mukhtar (described by the Italians as his complete submission) similar to previous Italo-Senusite accords. At the end of October, 1929, Mukhtar denounced the compromise and re-established a unity of action among Libyan forces, preparing himself for the ultimate confrontation with General Rodolfo Graziani, the Italian military commander from March 1930. A massive offensive in June against Mukhtar's forces having failed, Graziani, in full accord with Badoglio, Emilio De Bono (minister of the colonies), and Benito Mussolini, initiated a plan to break the Cyrenian resistance: the 100,000 population of Gebel would be relocated to concentration camps on the coast, and the Libyan-Egyptian border from the coast at Giarabub would be closed, preventing any foreign help to the fighters and depriving them of support from the native population. These measures, which Graziani initiated early in 1931, took their toll on the Senusite resistance. The rebels were deprived of help and reinforcements, spied upon, hit by Italian aircraft, and pursued on the ground by the Italian forces aided by local informers and collaborators. Mukhtar continued to struggle despite increased hardships and risks, but on 11 September 1931, he was ambushed near Slonta.

Mukhtar's final adversary, Italian General Rodolfo Graziani, has given a description of the Senusite leader that is not lacking in respect: "Of medium height, stout, with white hair, beard and mustache. Omar was endowed with a quick and lively intelligence; was knowledgeable in religious matters, and revealed an energetic and impetuous character, unselfish and uncompromising; ultimately, he remained very religious and poor, even though he had been one of the most important Senusist figures."

Capture and Execution:

Mukhtar's struggle of nearly twenty years came to an end on 11 September 1931, when he was wounded in battle near Slonta, then captured by the Italian army. The Italians treated the native leader hero as a prize catch. His resilience had an impact on his jailers, who later remarked upon his steadfastness. His interrogators stated that Mukhtar recited verses of peace from the Qur'an.

In three days, Mukhtar was tried, convicted, and, on 14 September 1931, sentenced to be hanged publicly (historians and scholars have questioned whether his trial was fair or impartial). When asked if he wished to say any last words, Mukhtar replied with a Qur'anic phrase: "Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji'un." ("To God we belong and to Him we shall return."). On 16 September 1931, on the orders of the Italian court and with Italian hopes that Libyan resistance would die with him, Mukhtar was hanged before his followers in the POW camp of Suluq at the age of 73 years.

U.S. Military Secret Ops Revealed

U.S. Military Averages More Than A Mission A Day In Africa

The numbers tell the story: 10 exercises, 55 operations, 481 security cooperation activities.

For years, the U.S. military has publicly insisted that its efforts in Africa are small scale. Its public affairs personnel and commanders have repeatedly claimed no more than a “light footprint” on that continent, including a remarkably modest presence when it comes to military personnel.  They have, however, balked at specifying just what that light footprint actually consists of.  During an interview, for instance, a U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) spokesman once expressed worry that tabulating the command’s deployments would offer a “skewed image” of U.S. efforts there.

It turns out that the numbers do just the opposite.

Last year, according AFRICOM commander General David Rodriguez, the U.S. military carried out a total of 546 “activities” on the continent -- a catch-all term for everything the military does in Africa.  In other words, it averages about one and a half missions a day.  This represents a 217% increase in operations, programs, and exercises since the command was established in 2008.

In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this month, Rodriguez noted that the 10 exercises, 55 operations, and 481 security cooperation activities made AFRICOM “an extremely active geographic command.”  But exactly what the command is “active” in doing is often far from clear.

AFRICOM releases information about only a fraction of its activities.  It offers no breakdown on the nature of its operations.  And it allows only a handful of cherry-picked reporters the chance to observe a few select missions.  The command refuses even to offer a count of the countries in which it is “active,” preferring to keep most information about what it’s doing -- and when and where -- secret.

While Rodriguez’s testimony offers but a glimpse of the scale of AFRICOM’s activities, a cache of previously undisclosed military briefing documents obtained by TomDispatch sheds additional light on the types of missions being carried out and their locations all across the continent.  These briefings prepared for top commanders and civilian officials in 2013 demonstrate a substantial increase in deployments in recent years and reveal U.S. military operations to be more extensive than previously reported.  They also indicate that the pace of operations in Africa will remain robust in 2014, with U.S. forces expected again to average far more than a mission each day on the continent.

The Constant Gardener

U.S. troops carry out a wide range of operations in Africa, including airstrikestargeting suspected militants, night raids aimed at kidnapping terror suspects, airlifts of French and African troops onto the battlefields of proxy wars, and evacuationoperations in destabilized countries.  Above all, however, the U.S. military conducts training missions, mentors allies, and funds, equips, and advises its local surrogates.

U.S. Africa Command describes its activities as advancing “U.S. national security interests through focused, sustained engagement with partners” and insists that its “operations, exercises, and security cooperation assistance programs support U.S. Government foreign policy and do so primarily through military-to-military activities and assistance programs.”

 Saharan Express is a typical exercise that biennially pairs U.S. forces with members of the navies and coast guards of around a dozen mostly African countries. Operations include Juniper Micron and Echo Casemate, missions focused on aiding French and African interventions in Mali and the Central African Republic.  Other “security cooperation” activities include the State Partnership Program, which teams African military forces with U.S. National Guard units and the State Department-funded Africa Contingency Operations Training and Assistance (ACOTA) program through which U.S. military mentors and advisors provide equipment and instruction to African units.

Many military-to-military activities and advisory missions are carried out by soldiers from the Army’s 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, as part of a “regionally aligned forces” effort that farms out specially trained U.S. troops to geographic combatant commands, like AFRICOM.  Other training engagements are carried out by units from across the service branches, including Africa Partnership Station 13 whose U.S. naval personnel and Marines teach skills such as patrolling procedures and hand-to-hand combat techniques.  Meanwhile, members of the Air Force recently provided assistance to Nigerian troops in areas ranging from logistics to airlift support to public affairs.

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Previously undisclosed U.S. Army Africa records reveal a 94% increase in all activities by Army personnel from 2011 to 2013, including a 174% surge in State Partnership missions (from 34 to 93) and a 436% jump in Advise-and-Assist activities including ACOTA missions (from 11 to 59).  Last year, according to a December 2013 document, these efforts involved everything from teaching Kenyan troops how to use Raven surveillance drones and helping Algerian forces field new mine-resistant ambush protected vehicles, or MRAPS, to training Chadian and Guinean infantrymen and aiding France’s ongoing interventions in West and Central Africa.

AFRICOM spokesman Benjamin Benson refused to offer further details about these activities. “We do training with a lot of different countries in Africa,” he told me.  When I asked if he had a number on those “different countries,” he replied, “No, I don’t.”  He ignored repeated written requests for further information.  But a cache of records detailing deployments by members of just the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, from June through December 2013, highlights the sheer size, scope, and sweep of U.S. training missions.

June saw members of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team deployed to Niger, Uganda, Ghana, and on two separate missions to Malawi; in July, troops from the team traveled to Burundi, Mauritania, Niger, Uganda, and South Africa; August deployments included the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, South Africa, Niger, two missions in Malawi, and three to Uganda; September saw activities in Chad, Togo, Cameroon, Ghana, São Tomé and Príncipe, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Uganda, and Malawi; in October, members of the unit headed for Guinea and South Africa; November’s deployments consisted of Lesotho, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Uganda, and Guinea; while December’s schedule consisted of activities in South Sudan, Cameroon, and Uganda, according to the documents.  All told, the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division carried out 128 separate “activities” in 28 African countries during all of 2013.

The records obtained by TomDispatch also indicate that U.S. Army Africa took part in almost 80% of all AFRICOM activities on the continent in 2013, averaging more than one mission per day.  Preliminary projections for 2014 suggest a similar pace this year -- 418 activities were already planned out by mid-December 2013 -- including anticipated increases in the number of operations and train-and-equip missions.

Full-scale exercises, each involving U.S. Army troops and members of the militaries of multiple African countries, are also slated to rise from 14 to 20 in 2014, according to the documents.  So far, AFRICOM has released information on 11 named exercises scheduled for this year.  These include African Lion in Morocco, Eastern Accord in Uganda, Western Accord in Senegal, Central Accord in Cameroon, and Southern Accord in Malawi, all of which include a field training component and serve as a capstone event for the prior year’s military-to-military programs.  AFRICOM will also conduct at least three maritime security exercises, including Cutlass Express off the coast of East Africa, Obangame Express in the Gulf of Guinea, and Saharan Express in the waters off Senegal and the Cape Verde islands, as well as its annual Africa Endeavor exercise, which is designed to promote “information sharing” and facilitate standardized communications procedures within African militaries.

Additionally, U.S. and African Special Operations forces will carry out an exercise codenamed Silent Warrior 2014 in Germany and have already completed Flintlock 2014 (since 2005, an annual event).  As part of Flintlock 2014, more than 1,000 troops from 18 nations, including Burkina Faso, Canada, Chad, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Mauritania, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Norway, Senegal, the United Kingdom, the U.S., and the host nation of Niger, carried out counterterror training on the outskirts of Niamey, the capital, as well as at small bases in Tahoua, Agadez, and Diffa.  “Although Flintlock is considered an exercise, it is really an extension of ongoing training, engagement, and operations that help prepare our close Africa partners in the fight against extremism and the enemies that threaten peace, stability, and regional security,” said Colonel Kenneth Sipperly, the commander of the U.S. Joint Special Operations Task Force-Trans Sahel, during the Flintlock opening ceremony.

Locations, Locations, Locations

A 2013 investigation by TomDispatch analyzing official documents and open source information revealed that the U.S. military was involved with at least 49 of the 54 nations on the African continent during 2012 and 2013 in activities that ranged from special ops raids to the training of proxy forces.  A map produced late last year by U.S. Army Africa bolsters the findings, indicating its troops had conducted or planned to conduct “activities” in all African “countries” during the 2013 fiscal year except for Western Sahara (a disputed territory in the Maghreb region of North Africa), Guinea Bissau, Eritrea, Sudan, Somalia, São Tomé and Príncipe, Madagascar, and Zimbabwe.  Egypt is considered outside of AFRICOM’s area of operations, but did see U.S. military activity in 2013, as didSomalia, which now also hosts a small team of U.S. advisors.  Other documents indicate Army troops actually deployed to São Tomé and Príncipe, a country that regularly conducts activities with the U.S. Navy.

AFRICOM is adamant that the U.S. military has only one base on the continent: Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti.  Official documents examined by TomDispatch, however, make reference to bases by other names: forward operating sites, or FOSes (long-term locations); cooperative security locations, or CSLs (through which small numbers of U.S. troops periodically rotate); and contingency locations, or CLs (which are used only during ongoing missions).

AFRICOM has repeatedly denied requests by TomDispatch for further information on the numbers or locations of FOSes, CSLs, and CLs, but official documents produced in 2012 make reference to seven cooperative security locations, including one in Entebbe, Uganda, a location from which U.S. contractors have flown secret surveillance missions, according to an investigation by the Washington Post.  Information released earlier this year by the military also makes references to at least nine “forward operating locations,” or FOLs in Africa.

We Know Not What They Do

“What We Are Doing,” the title of a December 2013 military document obtained by TomDispatch, offers answers to questions that AFRICOM has long sought to avoid and provides information the command has worked to keep under wraps.  So much else, however, remains in the shadows.

From 2008 to 2013, the number of missions, exercises, operations, and other activities under AFRICOM’s purview has skyrocketed from 172 to 546, but little substantive information has been made public about what exactly most of these missions involved and just who U.S. forces have trained.  Since 2011, U.S. Army Africa alone has taken part in close to 1,000 “activities” across the continent, but independent reporters have only been on hand for a tiny fraction of them, so there are limits to what we can know about them beyond military talking points and official news releases for a relative few of these missions.  Only later did it become clear that the United States extensively mentored the military officer who overthrew Mali’s elected government in 2012, and that the U.S. trained a Congolese commando battalion implicated by the United Nations in mass rapes and otheratrocities during that same year, to cite two examples.

Since its inception, U.S. Africa Command has consistently downplayed its role on the continent.  Meanwhile, far from the press or the public, the officers running its secret operations have privately been calling Africa “the battlefield of tomorrow, today.”

After years in the dark, we now know just how “extremely active” -- to use General David Rodriguez’s phrase -- AFRICOM has been and how rapidly the tempo of its missions has increased.  It remains to be seen just what else we don't know about U.S. Africa Command’s exponentially expanding operations.

Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch.com and a fellow at the Nation Institute.  A 2014 Izzy Award winner, his pieces have appeared in theNew York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, at the BBC and regularlyat TomDispatch. He is the author most recently of the New York Timesbestseller Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (just out in paperback).

Map Of Active US Military Ops In Africa

Thirteen nations – stretching from the Horn of Africa to Mali’s western border – already house U.S. troops involved in “actual military operations.” Their presence is widely considered part of an expanding “shadow war against al-Qaeda affiliates and other militant groups” in the region – and the American people know very little about it.

Like many wars throughout history, this one is starting small. Troop numbers remain low, and intelligence operations are housed mainly in small airbases constructed in the past seven years. They emphasize spy missions: Many involve aircraft disguised as private planes, and are equipped with full-motion sensors that track infrared heat patterns, record video and pick up radio and cellphone signals. At least 12 such bases have been built since 2007.

Things have been quiet thus far, but the U.S. has a troubled history of conducting proxy wars throughout Africa. Since 9/11 alone, American covert operations have contributed to violence and destabilization in Mali, the Central African Republic and Libya, among others. Without the level of pomp and troop involvement as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. forces can now subtly influence Africa’s political landscape as they see fit, while evading public scrutiny.

This should worry us. Despite their operations’ relative tameness nowadays – if launching drone strikes and fighting proxy wars can be considered “tame” – U.S. military intervention on the continent has rarely been without negative consequences. It’s grown increasingly important to remember this when calling for intervention in African affairs: Whatever Band-Aid effect Americans may have now, the long-term impact will be felt almost exclusively by the people who actually live there.

Remaining vigilant as our troops amass in growing numbers might be one of the few ways to avoid creating more problems we’re ill equipped to fix. The beginning of that process is education.

To that end, here’s a brief rundown of recent U.S. military activities and outposts in Sub-Saharan Africa:

Burkina Faso. Base established 2007 in Ouagadougou, launches spy planes to police and patrol the Islamic Maghreb.

Image Credit: Public Intelligence

Congo. Troops stationed in Congo to aid the search for Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army.

Central African Republic. Part of the broader search for the Lord’s Resistance Army.

Chad. 80 troops deployed May 21 to search for the kidnapped Nigerian girls.

Djibouti. Home to Camp Lemonnier, a full-blown military base that houses 4,000 troops and has a $1.4 billion expansion plan in the works. Also faces allegations of being used as a “black site” where terrorism suspects are tortured. A congressional investigation into the issue has yet to be declassified.

Image Credit: Public Intelligence

Ethiopia. Airport annex used to house Reaper drones flown over East Africa since 2011.

Image Credit: Public Intelligence

Kenya. Multiple bases, including Manda Bay (used to launch drone strikes) and Camp Simba, home to 60 military personnel since 2013.

Image Credit: Public Intelligence

Mali. Troops sent in 2013 to aid French and African forces in wartime, though the White House insisted they were not directly engaged in combat.

Niger. Drone base since 2013, also houses 100 military intelligence personnel.

Image Credit: Public Intelligence

Nigeria. Troops deployed to aid the search for the kidnapped girls earlier this month.

Somalia. Fewer than two dozen troops deployed for “training and advising” purposes in 2014.

South Sudan. Forty-five military personnel deployed to protect U.S. citizens and property in 2013.

Image Credit: Public Intelligence

Uganda. Launches surveillance aircraft out of a base in Entebbe, mostly used to search for Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army.

Image Credit: Public Intelligence

(Zak Cheney-Rice)