AU states to activate African Standby Force to strengthen war on terrorism

African Union member states have agreed to fully operationalize the African Standby Force (ASF) to strengthen the fight against terrorism in the continent and end Africa’s dependence on foreign forces to fight terrorism.

The agreement was announced by the AU’s director of conflict management Sarjoh Bah following an extraordinary summit of African Heads of State and Government in Malabo on Saturday.
“Member States condemned terrorism, agreed to fully operationalize the African Standby Force, share intelligence and jointly fight terrorism and transnational organized crime, improve natural resource governance, secure sustainable/predictable financing and support conflict victims,” Bah said in a statement on Sunday.

During the summit, AU Commission chairperson Moussa Faki Mahamat noted that terrorism had increased on the continent from 2011 with the Libyan crisis which resulted from the NATO-backed ouster of longtime Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

According to Mahamat, the crisis “opened the way for the arrival of foreign mercenaries in the Sahel and an influx of terrorist organizations defeated in the Middle East.”

Terrorism, he noted, had now spread to other parts of Africa, including Mozambique, Mali, the Gulf of Guinea in West Africa, Somalia, the Sahel, the Lake Chad Basin, and the eastern parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Mahamat blamed a lack of inter-African solidarity between countries fighting terrorism and a failure by African countries to honor their commitments as some of the major reasons behind the spread of terrorism on the continent.

He also noted there were double standards applied by the international community in tackling the challenges of terrorism in Africa compared to other parts of the world.

Some of the established joint forces to fight terrorism, include the AU Transition Mission in Somalia (ATMIS) in Somalia, the Joint Multinational Force in the Lake Chad Basin, the G5 Sahel Joint Force, and the SADC mission in Mozambique (SAMIM).

According to the 2022 Global Terrorism Index (GTI), Sub-Saharan Africa accounted for 48 percent of global terrorism deaths with four of the ten countries with the largest increases in deaths from terrorism coming from the region (Burkina Faso, DR Congo, Mali, and Niger).

The report further noted that terrorism was becoming increasingly concentrated and contracting into countries already suffering from violent conflict.

The Sahel region, which contains such countries, had become home to the world’s fastest-growing and most-deadly terrorist groups especially with Islamic State shifting its attention thereafter military defeats in Syria and Iraq.