Military stalks terrorists in Africa

CAMP LEMONIER, Djibouti — Three high-definition television screens, a bank of green military radios and detailed maps line the walls. Laptop computers cover three rows of tables. And military officers, among them Lt. Cmdr. Victor Cooper, keep 24-hour vigil, tracking terrorists from afar.

The Joint Operations Center, tucked inside a former French Foreign Legion post, is the heart of the Bush administration’s quiet battle against Islamic militants operating in six nations in East Africa and Yemen.

From here, the U.S. military monitors Marine beach landings, Navy warships, Army infantry maneuvers and Air Force flights, keeping in close communication with Central Command headquarters in Qatar and troops in the field. And there are secret operations no one will talk about.

The goal: to detect, disrupt and defeat the bad guys.

On a recent day, U.S. soldiers trained with local troops in rural Ethiopia, civil-affairs officers helped with rehab projects in Kenyan towns and Marines landed on a deserted beach in Djibouti.

Offshore, NATO ships coordinated their operations with the task force, searching ships in international waters for weapons and terrorists.

“We are the gathering point and dissemination point for all information,” said Cmdr. Cooper, of Jackson, Miss., his calm, friendly demeanor a reflection of how U.S. forces fight terrorism here.

Sometimes his job gets boring, he said, but then that’s the idea. A day without terrorist activity is a successful day, troops say.

The task force uses military training, humanitarian aid and intelligence operations to keep northeastern Africa and Yemen from becoming the next Afghanistan by strengthening local security forces and keeping terrorist groups from operating in the predominantly Muslim region, said Brig. Gen. Mastin Robeson, commander of the task force.

The 1,800 personnel at Camp Lemonier coordinate U.S. military operations in Kenya, Somalia, Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Yemen and Djibouti, a region largely ignored before the war on terrorism. The region is now one of the war’s main theaters.

“Here you have six countries that very positively desire to be partners in every way possible in the global war on terrorism,” Gen. Robeson said, leaving out Somalia, which doesn’t have a government.

“We are empowering host nations to retake neighborhoods that people are trying to take from them, so you have, in our opinion, sovereign governments here, who are being invaded, who have been invaded … with sleeper cells that are just now coming to life,” he added in an interview at his air-conditioned office.

Djibouti, an arid nation the size of Massachusetts, has long been a strategic link between Africa and the Middle East, with trade ships sailing along the coast for centuries. The French carved the colony out of the Horn of Africa to control the point where the Red Sea opens into the Gulf of Aden, one of the busiest waterways in the world.

The French Foreign Legion still keeps a brigade in Djibouti, and French forces train in the desert year-round as French Mirage fighter jets scream overhead. U.S. forces arrived in June 2002 at Camp Lemonier — a vacant, former Legion post — and the task force began operations from the tented camp in December 2002.

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