Armed forces commander-in-chief Khalifa Hafter has come away from two days in Moscow during which he met Russia’s defence and foreign ministers.

Diplomatic sources have said that on this, his second Russian visit since the summer, Hafter was seeking military as well as political support.  Both Moscow’s defence minister, general Sergei Shoigu and foreign minister Sergey Lavrov repeated that Russia backed the UN arms embargo and the Libyan political agreement.

Last month the Kremlin indicated that it would be prepared to supply military assistance to the Libyan government if it was requested. However, because Russia is respecting the Libyan Political Agreement to the letter, it will not recognise the Government of National Accord until its cabinet, as proposed by Faiez Serraj and the Presidency Council, has been endorsed by House of Representatives

Hafter was wearing a fur-lined Russian hat when he stopped in the foreign ministry lobby to talk to Arabic-language journalists this afternoon.

He said that the Russians had asked him if he needed their help combating terrorism. He also said that the Libyan National Army had acquired considerable experience fighting IS, adding that Libya was combating terrorism on behalf of the whole world.

A foreign ministry spokesman said the talks had “Focused talk on the evolution of the military and political situation in Libya, with an emphasis on the need to unite all Libyans to fight the terrorist organisations in the entire territory of the country”.

libyaherald.com

Many reports referred to Russian attempts to military intervene in Libya in support of the army led by General Khalifa Haftar, who is aided by Egypt and some regional countries.

According to the Israeli intelligence website, Debka, if Russian attempts succeeded, Russia will establish the second military air base in the Mediterranean, about 700 Km off Libya”.

Debka also said that the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, is preparing to establish a naval air base off Benghazi coast, like Hmeimim base close to Latakia, in exchange for naval and air support to Haftar”.

Debka described Haftar as a Libyan military militia leader that supported by Egypt and some Gulf countries. Egyptian and Emirati air forces provide Haftar with air support from Egyptian bases across western desert. Haftar doesn’t recognize the Libyan government forged by the United Nations located in Tripoli.

It also added that some elements in Egypt and the Gulf prompted Haftar to request the Russian support, he arrived in Moscow, on Sunday, to discuss the military support that Russia can provide him. It is the second time Haftar travels to Moscow in six months, following the previous visit in June, as he met Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, then the Russians were not ready to provide overt military support to the Libyan general.

Debka clarified that after the election of Donald Trump, the US president, and with speculations about American – Russian cooperation in the war Daesh in Syria, Putin said he is willing to expand such cooperation to Libya. The Israeli website reported that Russia is offering Haftar armaments of fighting jets, armored vehicles, and missiles.

According to the Russian proposal, the Russian planes will arrive directly to Libya from the Syrian Hmeimim, or from Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov that stationed now eastern of the Mediterranean. The aircraft carrier can sail from Syria to the center of Mediterranean and reposition off Benghazi. If such plan were executed, it would be the first time a Russian aircraft work in that part of the Mediterranean.

libyaprospect.com/

alaraby.co.uk

The international community is challenged for the “key role” of the Sahel region development in the fight which has been imposed by the threat of violent extremism and terrorism in this region, said Monday in Algiers Minister of Maghreb Affairs, Africa, Union and Arab League Abdelkader Messahel.

Speaking at the opening of the 4th session of Working Group on Sahel Capacity Building of the Global Counterterrorism Forum, Messahel said that the terrorism threat “persists” in this part of Africa, “despite the huge human and material efforts made by the region countries to eliminate it.”

“In spite of the efforts aiming at improving the living conditions of local populations through national and regional economic projects to boost growth, we notice that the very limited resources possessed by these countries do not allow them to fulfill all the aspirations and are still the causes of social and economic weakening of these countries,” he said.

Messahel said that such weakness is “exploited and manipulated” by those who are behind terrorism in their propaganda and recruitment campaigns.

In this regard, he said that the meeting is devoted “exclusively to the essential issue of the Sahel countries capacity building for the fight of this scourge.”

“Thus, terrorists’ reach is unfortunately larger and kills innocent people in peaceful cities of West Africa, warning all the region countries on the reality of the terrorist danger scope and on the capacity of its perpetrators to chose places, the nature and the reach of their criminal acts,” said the minister.

“This confirms, once again, that terrorism ignores borders and does not need any justifications, besides its own logic, to commit its crimes,” he said, adding that “ recruitment, and the return of foreign terrorist fighters from the conflict zones, like Iraq, Syria, and Libya is also increasing in the Sahel.”

The minister stressed the ‘”importance of preventing that the poor resources in the region could be manipulated by the terrorist groups, so to make of it the favorite destination of returning foreign fighters.”

For Messahel, “it is important that the bilateral, regional and international efforts for the creation of platforms of judicial, security and intelligence cooperation be encouraged as part of the works of the Working Group and globally as well.”

aps.dz

The Army Intelligence succeeded to arrest 11 armed persons, among them one of Daesh’s top leaders, the one responsible for booby-trapped cars and suicide bombers, Ahmad Youssef Amon (aka The Sheikh), the NNA correspondent in Arsal said.

Amon, who got injured in the clashes that led to his arrest, was transported on a helicopter to the hospital for treatment.

During the raids, the Army seized large amounts of weapons and explosive belts.

nna-leb.gov.lb/

At least eight Egyptian soldiers have lost their lives when a group of unidentified armed men launched an attack against a military checkpoint in the country’s restive Sinai Peninsula.

Egyptian army spokesman Brigadier General Mohamed Samir said in a statement that the assailants were onboard utility vehicles “laden with large amounts of explosives” and attacked the checkpoint late on Thursday.

He added that a car bomb attack in addition to a fierce exchange of gunfire and a separate bombing claimed the lives of eight members of army forces. At least 12 troops were also reportedly injured.

Samir noted that three militants were killed and several others wounded in the fighting, without providing any information about the exact location of the attack.

Security sources said earlier that attackers fired two rocket-propelled grenades at the checkpoint south of the city of el-Arish, situated 344 kilometers northeast of the capital Cairo, and three pick-up trucks carrying masked men then drove by and opened fire.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, but it had the hallmarks of those carried out by the Velayat Sinai group, previously known as Ansar Beit al-Maqdis.

Velayat Sinai militants have been responsible for most attacks in the Sinai Peninsula and Cairo that have increased ever since the country’s military ousted Egypt’s first democratically-elected President Mohamed Morsi in July 2013.

The military has been engaged in a high-scale security operation, dubbed “Martyr’s Right,” against militant positions in Northern Sinai since September 2015.

The operation got underway in the aftermath of coordinated terrorist attacks on several army checkpoints in the area, which claimed the lives of dozens of soldiers in July that year.

The militants pledged allegiance to the Daesh ]group, which is mainly active in Iraq and Syria, in 2014.

albawaba.com

Islamic State militant group accepts allegiance of a militia based in a region high in instability and low in security

Standing in front of tens of fighters clad in headscarves and sunglasses and carrying AK-47s in an unknown location, Adnan Abu Walid al-Sahrawi reads in Arabic from a scrap of paper in a video posted online in late October. After more than a minute of Sahrawi talking, the video cuts to a shot of multiple gloved hands held in the middle of a circle in a gesture of solidarity. The speaker recites a pledge of allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the purported leader of the Islamic State militant group (ISIS), who is described in Arabic as “Commander of the Faithful” and the “Caliph of the Muslims.” The others respond in an affirmative chorus, offering Baghdadi their service and loyalty.

The location of the video is unknown, but based on Sahrawi’s previous movements, it is likely to have been shot in Mali or Burkina Faso, two countries in Africa’s Sahel region: a vast arid belt stretching from across the continent from Senegal in the west to Eritrea in the east.

While the video was not particularly remarkable, what was more surprising is what came after. On October 30, ISIS’s semi-official media channel, Amaq, posted a statement online, saying that it had received a pledge of allegiance from “Katibat al-Mourabitoun” under Sahrawi’s leadership. The acknowledgement makes Sahrawi’s the first recognized ISIS splinter group in the Sahel, a region awash with al-Qaeda affiliates and a key transit point for migrants dreaming of reaching Europe—conditions that could make the region an ideal recruiting ground for ISIS.

Sahrawi has been a major player in the region’s recent violent history. He was born in Algeria according to jihadi policy group the Counter Extremism Project, though his surname suggests ties to Western Sahara —a contested region inhabited by the Sahrawi people, which is at the center of a wrangle between Morocco and the indigenous, Algerian-backed Polisario Front.

He has had stints in multiple jihadi groups in the Sahel region. When the conflict in northern Mali broke out in 2012 —in which a multiplicity of Islamist and ethnic Tuareg groups seized power of the country’s vast northern region—Sahrawi was thought to occupy a prominent role in the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (known by its French acronym, MUJAO), a splinter of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

Following French intervention in Mali in 2013, which routed the Islamists and restored nominal government control throughout the country, MUJAO reportedly merged with the Masked Men Brigade, another AQIM-linked group led by veteran Algerian jihadi Mokhtar Belmokhtar. The resultant group was known as Al-Mourabitoun, or ‘The Sentinels’.

Sahrawi’s defining moment came in May 2015. In an audio message released to Mauritanian news site Al-Akhbar, Sahrawi called on “all jihadi groups” to give their allegiance to Baghdadi, in order to “unite the voice of the Muslims” and “defend against the enemies of Islam.” Coming from such a senior figure, the statement was interpreted as a pledge of Al-Mourabitoun’s affiliation to ISIS. This was affirmed in a second audio message released days later, in which Sahrawi declared he was the “emir” or leader of Al-Mourabitoun; that the group had no ties to AQIM; and that he had decided to pledge allegiance to ISIS based on “various religious recommendations.”

The pledge provoked an angry response from Belmokhtar, who issued a statement saying that Sahrawi’s pledge was invalid since it had not been approved by the group’s shura council—its decision-making body—and reaffirming his allegiance to al-Qaeda’s global leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Belmokhtar’s Al-Mourabitoun reportedly clashed with Sahrawi’s group—which called itself the Islamic State in Greater Sahara (ISGS)—and planned the assassination of its leader, according to the Long War Journal.

Following the dispute, Sahrawi went quiet for more than a year. Presumably, he and his followers separated from the wider Al-Mourabitoun group and formed their own militia, but without any recognition from ISIS’s headquarters in Syria. It wasn’t until September that ISGS claimed its first attack : an assault on the Markoye customs post in Burkina Faso, close to the borders with both Mali and Niger, that left one customs official and one civilian dead. The group has since been linked with at least two further attacks: one in northern Burkina Faso, near the Malian border, in which three soldiers were killed overnight on October 12; and an attempted jailbreak on October 17 at the Koutoukalé prison in southwestern Niger, a high-security facility thought to hold militants from Nigerian militant group Boko Haram and AQIM, which was repelled by security forces.

Sahrawi’s official acceptance from ISIS means that all future attacks perpetrated will be linked to the group based in Syria and Iraq, according to Ryan Cummings, director of African security analysts Signal Risk. “Attacks orchestrated by Sahrawi will be claimed by ISIS via Amaq as an extension of the group’s operations in the Sahara,” he says.

But Cummings notes that ISIS has not gone so far as to declare a wilayat —or province—in the Sahel, as they have done, for example, in Nigeria, following Boko Haram’s pledge of allegiance to Baghdadi in 2015.

The reluctance to declare an official ISIS province in the Sahara is probably attributable, at least in part, to al-Qaeda’s near-total dominance of the jihadi scene across the Sahel region, and indeed most of sub-Saharan Africa. While ISIS fighters have threatened to breach the Sahel from Libya and Boko Haram have perpetrated attacks in Niger, al-Qaeda is unquestionably the foremost jihadi franchize in sub-Saharan Africa. It has had an official branch in the Sahel since 2006, when the then Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat—an offshoot of a militant Islamist group formed in the early 1990s that was involved in Algeria’s civil war—pledged its allegiance to al-Qaeda, later rebranding itself as AQIM. It ranks include battle-hardened jihadis trained in Afghanistan, alongside former al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, and the group has governing experience in northern Mali, having held substantial territory in the country for several months before the French counter-insurgency.

That legacy means it will be difficult for ISGS to displace AQIM in the region, says Andrew Lebovich, visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “Sahrawi has his own networks and his own people, but it’s not an easy area to operate in. AQIM has spent many years recruiting locally, marrying into prominent families and establishing its own networks, loyalties and support structures,” he says. “It is by no means uncontested terrain.”

A potentially big lure for ISIS in the Sahel region is its status as one of Africa’s main migration hubs. Niger, in particular, has become a transit point for West African migrants, a large proportion of whom are heading towards Libya and attempting to cross the Mediterranean into Europe via Italy. Between February and September, the International Organization of Migration (IOM) has recordedat least 270,000 migrants passing through Séguedine, a passing point for migrants en route to Libya through Niger.

The United Nations’ Special Envoy for the Sahel, Hiroute Guebre Sellassie, warned in November 2015 that up to 41 million young people in the region were at risk of radicalization or forced migration due to a lack of educational and economic opportunities.

The head of the IOM’s Niger operation, Giuseppe Loprete, says that migrants passing through the country are “definitely vulnerable” to the influence of extremist groups. “They have nothing, they transit in areas that are very dangerous,” says Loprete. He adds that attacks on Niger’s border with Mali are now taking place “almost every day” and that militants can easily move between countries in the region. “Borders are porous, everybody can come in and out, just by going around the border control without being checked or anything. It’s easy for [the militants], they know the area very well,” he says.

For now, the focus for ISGS will be on gathering resources and followers. Cummings speculates that the group will have to establish a routine pattern of attacks in a specific area for ISIS to consider declaring a wilayat in the region: he highlights the Oudalan province in northern Burkina Faso, bordering both Mali and Niger and where the group’s activities seem to be concentrated, as an at-risk area.

Lebovich doesn’t rule out the possibility of large-scale attacks by the group in the future, as it seeks to establish itself as a player alongside AQIM. The latter has been linked to three major attacks in the past year: the November 2015 assault on the Radisson Blu hotel in Mali ; the attack on a cafe and hotel in Burkina Faso’s capital, Ouagadougou, in January; and the siege of a beach resort in Ivory Coast in March. It wouldn’t be outside the realms of possibility, once ISGS has recruited more fighters, for it to seek to compete in such attacks.

“These groups have tended to mix different kinds of attacks in order to create space to operate, generate income and maintain their style of operations,” says Lebovich, “Anything is possible.”

newsweek.com

The Egyptian President, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, said his country fully supports the “Libyan Army” led by Khalifa Haftar as it supports the Syrian Army under the command of Bashar Al-Assad.

In a TV interview with a Portuguese channel, el-Sisi said their priority is to back up what he called the Libyan Army for it to have full control of the Libyan soil in order to stem terrorism and prevail stability and security.

Many reports have surfaced lately showing logistic and military support given by the Egyptian military to the Haftar Operation Dignity forces in their alleged war on terror in eastern Libya, especially in Benghazi.

Last year, Egyptian airplanes carried airstrikes on Derna residential houses killing and injuring a number of civilians and the Egyptian President later admitted carrying out the bombing on media.

libyanexpress.com

Tunisian President Beji Caid Essebsi has said U.S. surveillance drones are flying over the Tunisian-Libyan border to ward of attacks by Islamic State, after lawmakers called on his government to clarify U.S. reports on such a mission.

In Tunisia, any U.S. military presence on its soil is a sensitive topic. Opponents say it would be a breach of sovereignty. Last month U.S. government sources said U.S. surveillance drones had begun flying into Libya from a Tunisian air base. [nL1N1CW1TA]

But Essebsi, in a television interview broadcast late on Tuesday, said the measure was needed to avoid cross-border attacks by militants such as an Islamic State assault on the Tunisian town of Ben Guerdan in March.

The drones being used were unarmed, Essebsi said, and in a repeat of previous denials, added there was no U.S. base in Tunisia.

Asked if U.S. drones were flying missions at the border, Essebsi told local channel Elhiwar Ettounsi, “Yes, and it was at our request.”

“Our agreement with the U.S. was to share intelligence information,” he said. He did not say whether the drones were flying across Libyan territory.

Islamic State exploited the chaos of post-uprising Libya to establish a foothold there, using it as a base for attacks Tunisia and Egypt. The perpetrators of several militant attacks in Tunisia in the past two years were trained in Libya.

The United States is fighting the group’s Libyan arm with air strikes launched from its ships in the Mediterranean and armed drones launched from Sicily.

Washington’s use of armed drones against militants in countries such as Yemen and Pakistan has been criticised for its toll on civilians, and some opponents question its legality under international law.

Essebsi said there was a fear of attacks from abroad.

“We do not have clear information, and we should act instead of waiting until another Ben Guerdan,” he said.

reuters.com