Brigadier General Dagvin Anderson, Commander of United States Special Operations in Africa (AFRICOM), has had a series of exchanges in Abidjan with the Ivorian Army Chief, Lt. Gen. Lassina Doumbia, to get acquainted with the West African country’s responses to the terrorist threat.
General Dagvin Anderson, who was leading an AFRICOM delegation, was briefed for an hour on Friday on how the Ivorian authorities perceive the terrorist threat and the security responses they have taken to counter it, in particular through their system dubbed “Impassable Border,” a note from the Ivorian army says.
The American hosts were given a presentation on a map by the Ivorian Army Chief, materializing the risk zones and describing the modes of terrorist action that Cote d’Ivoire could face, an approach strongly shared by the American delegation.
During the presentation, which took place in the Army Chief’s office, the two generals reviewed the overall security situation in Sub-Saharan Africa, insisting on their “common views on the persistence of the plague and the solutions to contain it and then eradicate it.”
“The situation in the Sahel worries us even more, in the sense that we are the only West African country, sharing borders with two of the countries affected by the scourge of Jihadism,” General Lassina Doumbia said, as he was assessing the regional security situation.
This working session, beyond sharing information, also gave the two delegations to exchange opinions and analyze the situation in the Sahel. US forces for Africa provide most of the intelligence to armies in the sub-Saharan region, an area difficult to access but of enormous geostrategic importance.
“The Sahel is the only junction point between two major jihad franchises in the world, which are the Islamic State represented by Adnane Abou Walid al-Sahraoui and Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) which is led by the elusive Mokhtar Belmokhtar,” General Anderson explained.
For West African countries, there is therefore an urgent need to contain the threat, he continued, suggesting that this involves raising awareness among the populations but above all sharing information between the intelligence units of the countries concerned.
The Command for Special Operations for Africa is a dismemberment of the United States Command for Africa (AFRICOM), based in Stuttgart, Germany and headed by General Stephen J. Townsen.
It is a unified command for Africa created by the United States Department of Defense in 2007 and became operational in 2008. It coordinates all of the military and security activities of the United States on the African continent.
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