Terror Metastasizes

by Eze Eluchie,

To the fishermen and villagers who eck out their living in Grand Bassam, the largely abandoned former colonial capital city of Cote D’Ivoire, the worst crimes that had ever visited their lands were sporadic cases of burglary and once in a while instances of out-of-town vagrants dispossessing tourists of handsets and loose cash. Life was easy going, cool and largely stress-free  – that was until the afternoon of Sunday, 13th March 2016, when a gang of terrorists linked to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) stormed their peace, attacking the L’Etoile de Sud, killing 14  people, maiming several others and forever dis-virgin the serenity of Grand Bassam.

Earlier in the year, on January 18^th 2016 to be precise, the Splendid Hotel, an upscale rendezvous for Western diplomats, tourists and expats, had played unwilling hosts to marauding terrorists affiliated to AQIM who in a relentless orgy of violence, wasted 29 lives and required the robust intervention of soldiers and foreign troops to rescue over 120 persons who the terrorists had held hostage. The first sign of AQIM’s growing interest in West Africa had been announced in a brash attack at the upscale Radisson Blu Hotel in Bamako, Mali, in November 2015, where the killing of 22 persons by Islamist terrorists, via lavish discharge of high calibre bullets, had been preceded by chants of ‘Allahu Akbar’ (Arabic phrase meaning ‘God is Great’).   

In all three instances described above, the terrorists were indigenous. Not some frenzied brainwashed Arabian, but black Africans, native to the various countries attacked. Extremist Islamist terror of the fatalistic genre crafted in the Middle East had metastasized into a region once known for their peaceable disposition and religious tolerance. Extremist Islamist Terror had indeed arrived West Africa.

The question that readily comes to mind is: Which West African country will be the next venue of this unholy rendezvous between AQIM terrorists and expats, tourists and other patrons of upscale Hotels in West Africa and other soft targets where Westerners congregate? Will it be Ghana, Benin, Togo or Nigeria. The question is 'which' and not 'if any'!

How did we get to this sorry state? Was it inevitable or man-made? Is there a way out?

How: Without doubt, the large pool of unemployed, unskilled and uneducated youths created by inept policies and actions of decades of oppressive and spectacularly vile regimes throughout the West Africa sub-region had created an enabling environment which provided Islamist terror organizations sufficient leeway to flourish and recruit converts. Two incidents, occurring contemporaneously, beyond the territories of West Africa however served as precursors to the current terror epidemic which is in the process of consuming West Africa: the so-called Arab Spring which led to the overthrow of strong regimes across North Africa, whose strong-arm tactics against extremists had served as buffer, insulating West Africa from the effects of extremist terror in the Middle East and secondly, the dislodgment of terror organizations from their traditional bases in the Middle East by sustained attacks from Western forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Syria.

Inevitable?: Certainly not! More pragmatic intervention to address Islamist terrorist attacks against Western interests based on better understanding of the psyche and mindset of Arabs and less greed by Western governments and entrepreneurs to control access to vast reserves of crude oil would have avoided the blind haste in instigating and supporting the murder and removal of rulers in Iraq (Saddam Hussein) and Libya (Muammar Qhadaffi), acts which allowed the proliferation and entrenchment of extremist and fringe Islamist in territories where they would have been nipped in the bud and obliterated at the slightest sign of their efforts to congregate.

Solution: Carrot and Stick approach. Extremist Islamist terrorism is akin to a cancer. If it had been nipped in its bud, we would have been spared of the gory spectacle the world is now confronted with. Having missed early eradication, and considering how wide spread the cancer has metastasized, the one viable option is to conduct a radical ‘mastectomy’, uprooting and extinguishing afflicted persons and deploying massive prevention strategies (whole scale targeted education and re-education) on children and youngsters in territories liberated from the clutch of terrorist control. Simple as it sounds, this remains a feasible way out of the quagmire.

Realizing that all the fire power unleashed to curb Islamist terrorism is merely misguidedly creating more martyrs, the reality that bullets and bombs alone cannot guarantee success over terror ought to have sunk into the consciousness of all concerned by now. There is thus the need to augment military and security actions against terror with well coordinated educational and societal re-engineering techniques to ensure that the children in areas likely to form the recruit base of Islamist fundamentalism are nurtured and adequately incentivised to shun extremist ideologies and philosophies.

Conscious of the need to ensure its continued existence after its present bunch of misguided recruits might have expired, terror organizations have been aggressively recruiting children into their fold and doing whatsoever to educate and indoctrinate these innocents, unfortunate enough to be within their areas of influence, into accepting barbaric violence and bestiality as a ‘true path’ to tow.   Recruitment videos of Islamist terror featuring children and reports of children being made to behead or execute captives of terror organizations are awash online. If no aggressive efforts are initiated and sustained to block the recruitment of children into terror, we can as well resign ourselves to a continuum of the madness that has gradually crept into West Africa and will soon overwhelm Europe and the Americas.

Picture: Next generation terrorists being groomed.