ADF

IEDs Become the Weapon of Choice in Asymmetric Warfare On Sunday, December 28, 2014, a sugar cane seller in Potiskum, Nigeria, died when she stepped on a bomb in a school football field. She was 12 years old. The bomb was planted Sunday to be triggered the next day when the field would be crowded with children. Instead, the girl stepped on it early in the evening, when she was one of the only people on the field. A few months earlier, a suicide bomber in Nigeria’s Yobe state rode a motorized rickshaw to an outdoor venue, where people watched…

Extremist groups seek CBRN weapons, but what is the likelihood of an attack? ALEXANDER DETERT/ALUMNUS OF THE GEORGE C. MARSHALL EUROPEAN CENTER FOR SECURITY STUDIES Instability in the wake of the Arab Spring and a new crop of aggressive terrorist organizations, including the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), have prompted some to announce that we are entering a new era of extremism. This means it is necessary to look at old threats from new angles, such as the use of chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) weapons by terrorist organizations. Has extremism changed to a degree that contemporary terrorist…

A Conversation with the AMISOM Force Commander Photos by AMISOM Lt. Gen. Silas Ntigurirwa was the force commander of the 22,000-person African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) from December 2013 to December 2014. The first Burundian to hold the post, he arrived in Somalia after a long military career during which he specialized in overseeing complex disarmament, demobilization and reintegration processes in Burundi. The 46-year-old officer is married with four children. He has held numerous posts in his home country, including command positions at the platoon, company and battalion levels. He also served in Côte d’Ivoire as chairman of security…

Kenya’s government is bringing some light — and hope — to Kibera, a sprawling slum on the outskirts of Nairobi. Population and area figures differ from source to source, but at least 200,000 people are believed to live there. Crime is no stranger to Kibera. Carolyn Njoroge recalls a terrifying evening in late 2007, when she became a victim of violence that erupted as a result of national elections. “My next-door neighbor kicked my door in, shouting that he wanted to kill us for us electing the president,” Njoroge told The Telegraph in 2013. “I hid under the bed while…

Case Studies from Iran, Sri Lanka and Somalia BY FRANCOIS VREŸ, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, PH.D., FACULTY OF MILITARY SCIENCE, STELLENBOSCH UNIVERSITY, SOUTH AFRICA This article was adapted from a paper the author wrote while on exchange to the faculty of the Royal Danish Defence College, Copenhagen. Asymmetry can be used to describe several types of conflicts, but it’s a mistake to associate asymmetry exclusively with irregular opponents fighting conventionally structured military forces. Another mistake is to focus only on land-based asymmetry. Asymmetry is generally understood as the outcome of a process in which weaker actors look for ways to blunt or minimize…

In North Africa, extremists who fought alongside ISIS on the battlefield are returning home. At the beginning of 2015, an estimated 31,000 fighters in the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, had tightened their grip over a vast swath of land. Thousands of those fighters were African. And as ISIS tries to expand into new territory, African fighters have begun to return to their home countries. They are bringing their extremism with them. ISIS, also known as ISIL, began in 1999 in Iraq, founded by the now-deceased Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a militant Islamist from Jordan. In 2004,…

A Kenyan Organization is Fighting Extremism by Empowering Youths PHYLLIS MUEMA/EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, KENYA COMMUNITY SUPPORT CENTRE If a battle against extremism is being waged in East Africa, coastal Kenya is on the front line. About 3.2 million people — approximately half of them Muslim and half Christian — live in the six counties that make up coastal Kenya. The region is about 600 square kilometers and stretches from Kenya’s southern border with Tanzania to its northeastern border with Somalia. The area, especially its largest port city Mombasa, has a history of tension with the national government. The coastal population believes…

The West African Epidemic Shines a Light on the Need for Water and Sanitation Infrastructure In late 2013, Ebola took root in West Africa, spreading like wildfire and throwing the region into chaos. By early March 2015, it had killed nearly 10,000, mostly in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. As Ebola raged, a quieter, more insidious killer took its toll all over the continent: a lack of clean water. London-based nongovernmental organization WaterAid estimates that dirty water killed 73,000 — more than seven times as many people as Ebola — in Nigeria alone in 2014. Nigeria is not unique in…

Nigeria looks to stem the flow of weapons to Boko Haram. In a blurry, 36-minute video shot somewhere in northeastern Nigeria, a man wearing a black cap and reading from a stack of papers stands beside a weapons cache. “We are now showing the world all the arms and ammunition that we got from the Nigeria Army barracks,” said Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau, speaking first in Arabic and then in Hausa. “What we have in our armory now, plus all that we had before, is enough to execute a victorious war against the whole of Nigeria.” Shekau went on…

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE For generations, Maasai warriors in Kenya proved their manhood by killing a lion, but a campaign led by Olympic champion David Rudisha is working to swap spearing for sport. As the numbers of big cats rapidly decline due to poaching and humans’ increasing encroachment on their territory, a special Maasai Olympics organized by conservationists aims to provide an alternative test of the warriors’ strength. Rudisha, the 800-meter gold medalist and world record-holder — and himself a Maasai — is patron of the games. In a Kenyan twist on classic athletics events, the warriors threw spears instead of javelins.…