The American campaign against terrorism is opening a new front in a region that military officials fear could become the next base for al-Qaeda -- the largely ungoverned swath of territory stretching from the Horn of Africa to the Western Sahara's Atlantic coast.
Generals at the US European Command in Stuttgart, which oversees the area, say the vast, arid region is a new Afghanistan, with well-financed bands of Islamic militants recruiting, training and arming themselves. Terrorist attacks like the one on March 11 in Madrid, Spain, that killed 191 people seem to have a North African link, investigators say, and may presage others in Europe.
Having learned from missteps in Afghanistan and Iraq, the American officers are pursuing this battle with a new approach. Instead of planning on a heavy American military presence, they are dispatching Special Operations forces to countries like Mali and Mauritania to train soldiers and outfit them with pickup trucks, radios and global-positioning equipment.
"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 command's chief of counterterrorism, Lieutenant Colonel Powl Smith, adding that by helping local governments to do the fighting themselves, "we don't become a lightning rod for popular anger that radicals can capitalize on."
American military officials say that Qaeda-linked militants, pushed out of Afghanistan and blocked by increased surveillance of traditional points of entry along the Mediterranean coast, are turning to overland travel in order to make contact with North African Islamic terror groups.
The US is working with the countries of the so-called Sahel, the impoverished southern fringe of the Sahara, to shore up border controls and deny sanctuary to suspected terrorists.
The program, called the Pan-Sahel Initiative, was begun with US$7 million and focused on Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Chad.
It is now being expanded to include Senegal and possibly other countries.
All of the countries in the region expressed anxiety about the growing threat of Islamic militancy within their borders. Government officials in Burkina Faso have complained to American officials about "bearded ones" showing up in remote areas preaching the salafist, or a fundamentalist, strain of Islam that inspires the world's Islamic militants.
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