12 May 2004	Wednesday	21 Rabi-ul-Awwal 1425

WASHINGTON, May 11: US Special Operations forces are training countries in North Africa in anti-terror operations because the region is becoming the new base of the Al Qaeda network, The New York Times said on Tuesday.

US military commanders at the US European Command in Stuttgart, Germany, told the daily newspaper that a largely ungoverned swath of territory stretching from the Horn of Africa to the Western Sahara's Atlantic coast was "a new Afghanistan".

Well-financed bands of militants are recruiting, training and arming themselves in the vast, arid region also known as Sahel, with governments such as Burkina Faso complaining about "bearded ones" preaching in remote areas what the authoritires call a fundamentalist strain of Islam.

"These are not local extremists," a US official told the daily. "These are people from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia who are essentially Islamic missionaries preaching a form of Islam that is very, very different from what these countries want or grew up with."

The March 11 bombings in Madrid that killed 191 people, with their North African links, the official said, might presage other similar extremist attacks in Europe.

To tackle Al Qaeda and associated groups in the region, the daily said, the United States has adopted a new approach: rather than a heavy American military presence, they are dispatching Special Operations forces to train soldiers and equip them with pickup trucks, radios and global-positioning systems.

"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 European Command's chief of counter terrorism, Lieutenant Colonel Powl Smith.

He said that by aiding local governments to do the fighting themselves, "we don't become a lightning rod for popular anger that radicals can capitalize on."

Launched after the 9/11 attacks on the United States with an initial seven million dollars, the Pan-Sahel Initiative focused on Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Chad and is currently being expanded to Senegal and possibly other countries. -AFP