Nigeria and Libya - Battlegrounds for the Future of Africa

AP and CNN report that bombs ripped through a busy bus terminal and markets frequented by thousands of people in Nigeria's central city of Jos on Tuesday afternoon. Police could nnot yet give an estimate of casualties,"but news services report at least 4 dead and 90 wounded. The origin of the bombs is not clear, but they are suspected to be the work of Boko Haram, the islamist terrorist group that kidnapped and is threatening to sell into slavery almost 300 schoolgirls from a remote town in northeast Nigeria that is the traditional stronghold of Boko Haram. The group wants to turn Nigeria into an Islamic state under Shariah law. (Half of Nigeria's population of 170 million is Christian.) Boko Haram has increased both the scope and deadliness of its attacks this year. Earlier this year, Boko Haram bombs killed more than 120 people and wounded more than 200 in Abuja, the Nigerian capital. A suicide car bomber killed 25 people in the northern city, Kano, on Monday, but police were able to detonate a second car bomb before it exploded. They said both would have killed many people but the first exploded before it reached its target of restaurants and bars in the Christian quarter of the Moslem city. Kano, known for its mild climate, is in Nigeria's middle belt region in Plateau state, which divides the country into the predominantly Moslem north and Christian south. On Christmas Eve in 2010, bombs allegedly planted by Boko Haram exploded in Jos, killing as many as 80 people. More than 300 people have been killed in assaults on towns and villages in recent weeks, and the extremists also are blamed for an attack on a Chinese camp in neighboring Cameroon in which one Cameroonian soldier was killed and 10 Chinese workers abducted. Militants' attacks are increasing in frequency despite a year-old military state of emergency to curtail the uprising. The Nigerian Senate on Tuesday voted to extend the state of emergency for another six months but only if President Goodluck Jonathan devotes more money to the military campaign and to the living conditions and arming of demoralized soldiers who say Boko Haram is better equiped. National and international outrage has mushroomed over the mass abduction of the schoolgirls and the military's failure to rescue them, forcing Jonathan to accept help from several nations, including Britain, France, Israel and the United States, in the search for the girls. It also has brought massive attention to the extremist islamist group, which is demanding the release of detained insurgents in exchange for the girls - a swap officials say the government will not consider. Diplomats said Nigeria on Tuesday asked the UN Security Council committee monitoring sanctions against al-Qaida to add Boko Haram to the list, with an arms embargo and asset freeze. More than 2,000 people have been killed so far in 2014, compared to 3,600 killed in the period from 2010 to 2013. ~~~~ Meanwhile CNN reports that the US military has doubled the number of aircraft on alert in Italy, ready to evacuate Americans from the US Embassy in Tripoli, Libya. A decision to evacuate as violence in the Libyan capital grows is "minute by minute, hour by hour," a defense official told CNN on Monday. Four additional US V-22 Osprey aircraft "arrived overnight" at the naval base in Sigonella, Italy, to join four V-22s and 200 Marines that had been moved there last week, according to a defense source quoted by CNN. The V-22 Ospreys can take off and land vertically with at least two dozen passengers and can be in the air on six hours' notice, the official said. The additional aircraft give the military the capability to evacuate more than 200 people from the embassy. The aircraft and Marines are part of the Marine Air-Ground Task Force Crisis Response team, stationed in Moron, Spain, formed after the attack on the US diplomatic compound in Benghazi in 2012 to provide closer standby military capability in a crisis. In Tripoli, fierce fighting broke out on Sunday after armed men stormed the interim Parliament. Sporadic bursts of gunfire and blasts continued Monday evening. The violence may be the worst since the 2011 revolution against Moammar Qaddafi's regime. In response, the speaker of the interim parliament, Nuri Abu Sahmain, who is backed by islamist forces, ordered troops known as the "Central Libya Shield Forces" to deploy to the capital Monday, the Libyan state news agency LANA reported. The forces, mostly from the city of Misrata east of Tripoli, are considered to be among the most powerful islamist-affiliated militias. In other news, the Saudi ambassador to Libya announced that his country's embassy and consulate in Tripoli closed Monday because of the violence, and the staff has left Tripoli, according to the official Saudi Press Agency. The sites will reopen when the situation stabilizes, Ambassador Mohammed Mahmoud Al-Ali said. Turkey took similar measures, shutting down ts consulate in Benghazi, as reported by Turkey's semi-official Anadolu news. Algeria closed its Tripoli embassy and evacuated all personnel late last week. ~~~~~ Dear readers, the situation in Nigeria and Libya should be of great concern to everyone. These two countries in western Africa are becoming battlegrounds between ostrnsibly popularly supported governments and islamist terrorist groups tied to al-Qaida. While Libya has not been stable since the 2011 revolution, with a weak interim central government and parliament and no agreed constitution for moving forward in any firection but chaos, Nigeria has the patina of a democratically elected government, which is in many ways the shell hiding an extremely corrupt governing clique indifferent to itspeople's needs. The Islamist milituas in Libya and Boko Haram and other islamist groups in Nigeria are feeding on the vacuum and dissatisfaction left by non-functioning governments to promise stability under sharia law, not bothering to tell their prey that behind the sharia law lies a radical and violent corruption of Islam that is meant to terrorize local Moslem populations into slaves of their captors. For too long, the West has turned a blind eye to African islamist jihadists. The UN, the EU and the US have thought that the continent was not worth worrying about. This has changed with the arrival of China, smart enough to want to be part of the future of an Africa filled with valuable resources, farmland and workers. But, China will never stop the islamist surge in Africa. The West can if it acts soon. And it should, in the process, bring China into a more reasonable position in Africa in exchange for saving its billions of sunk dollars - money that is meaningless in dealing with the islamists.