East Africa's terror ties

Joseph Winter:

The news that three of the suspects held in connection with the failed London bombings on 21 July were born in East Africa has once again put the region in the spotlight.

They are not being linked to any militant activities in their countries of birth, but connections between East Africa and Al-Qaeda have long been established there.

There are frequent reports of terror cells operating in East Africa, especially in Somalia, a fiercely Muslim country with no functioning government.

Indeed the United States takes the threat of terror attacks coming from East Africa so seriously that it has set up an anti-terror task force, of almost 2,000 men, in Djibouti to monitor the region.

The region's links to al-Qaeda date to 1991, when Osama Bin Laden set up training camps in Sudan, before moving to Afghanistan.

More than 220 people died in 1998 when the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were blown up, in attacks which the US says Bin Laden ordered.

One of those indicted for these bombings, Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, from the Comoros Islands, just off the East African coast, has never been caught and is thought to remain in the region.

And in 2002, 13 people were killed when suicide bombers targeted an Israeli-owned hotel near the Kenyan resort of Mombasa. Hours later, a missile narrowly missed a plane carrying Israeli tourists back home from the Indian Ocean resort.

United Nations officials say that those who carried out these attacks passed through Somalia and may also have purchased their weapons in the open-air arms bazaar in the capital, Mogadishu.

By definition, it is very difficult to know what is going on in a country without a government.

There is no-one to stop a terror group from setting up in one of Somalia's many sparsely populated areas - as long as they have enough money and local links to smooth their passage.

Radical Islamic preachers are among the groups which have tried to fill the vacuum left by the absence of government.

On the streets of Mogadishu, almost all women and girls wear a tightly-wrapped veil covering their necks and all their hair. Some cover their entire faces, with just a narrow slit in front of their eyes.

Before Somali descended into anarchy in the early 1990s, women were much more relaxed in their dressing.

Preachers have told people that Islam offers the answer to their many problems and sharia courts have been set up to try and dispense some justice based on Islamic law.

As society has moved towards a more extreme version of Islam, it is quite possible that some groups have gone much further.

And there is no shortage of young men who see violence as their only way of earning a living.

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