Day: March 17, 2022

PENTAGON — The Russian Wagner Group mercenary organization has tried to enlist some of its units in Africa to fight for Russia in Ukraine, the top commander of U.S. military forces in Africa told VOA.

“We’re seeing some efforts to recruit Wagner units for Ukraine,” Gen. Stephen Townsend, commander of U.S. Africa Command, said in an exclusive interview with VOA this week.

Townsend added those units would likely transfer primarily from Libya, where hundreds of Russian mercenaries are supporting eastern-based military commander Khalifa Haftar.

Townsend said AFRICOM has transferred some resources to the U.S. European Command as Russia invaded Ukraine. He said his command had provided EUCOM about 30 personnel, “mostly intelligence analysts and planners,” along with some of the combatant command’s shared intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities and aircraft.

“We’ve seen some impacts to things like airlift because we’re reinforcing NATO,” Townsend said.

“We’re also supplying aid to Ukraine, and so those flights have slowed down some things for AFRICOM, but I wouldn’t say that they’ve had a significant impact on our operations,” he said.

In January, Townsend told VOA Russia’s military had helped deliver Russian troops to Mali.

There are now about 1,000 Russian mercenaries in Mali who have run a few operations, he said, but the group has seen less support in recent weeks from the Russian military, probably because of the invasion of Ukraine. Wagner mercenaries are also in the Central African Republic and, to a lesser extent, Sudan, he said.

Al-Shabab suspected to have power to strike outside Africa

Townsend also said he suspects the al-Shabab terror group in Somalia may now have the capability to strike Americans outside of Africa, including in the United States.

“I suspect that they do. That’s not widely accepted in Washington or in the intel community, but my instincts as a commander are that they do,” he told VOA.

As recently as last month, U.S. officials had said that while Somalia’s al-Qaida affiliate aspires to go after Western targets outside of Somalia, it lacks the capacity to attack the United States.

Townsend conceded the group’s exact capabilities were uncertain, calling their ability to launch attacks against the homeland “an open question.”

He said al-Shabab remains the “greatest threat” on the continent, and over the last year it had “enjoyed great freedom of movement throughout Somalia.”

“They have grown bigger, stronger and bolder,” he said.

In late 2020, then-President Donald Trump ordered most of the 800 U.S. troops out of Somalia in one of his last foreign policy moves in office. In the roughly 15 months since then, U.S. forces have continued to “commute to work,” flying in and out of Somalia for missions while leaving fewer than 100 troops in the war-torn country.

“I think it’s inefficient, it’s certainly less effective. We’re not there long enough to get momentum, and then we start over,” he told VOA, adding that it also increases the risk to U.S. troops who must reestablish security each time they move in and out.

Asked about the situation by Republican Senator Thom Tillis during Senate Armed Services Committee testimony Tuesday, Townsend said, “we are marching in place at best, we may be backsliding in the security in Somalia, the security situation.”

Townsend told VOA he believed Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had provided his advice to the White House and was giving administration leaders the “time and space to make their decisions.”

No Chinese base plans for Equatorial Guinea

Townsend said in January that the United States believed China is trying to establish a base on Africa’s Atlantic Coast, with Equatorial Guinea as the place where the Chinese were receiving the most traction.

Last month, Molly Phee, the U.S. State Department’s top Africa official, led a delegation to Equatorial Guinea that included representatives from AFRICOM.

“The leaders there [in Equatorial Guinea] emphatically deny that they plan to have a Chinese base in their country. So, for now we’ll take them at their word, and we’ll watch what they do,” Townsend told VOA when asked about any reassurances the delegation had received.

“We’re not trying to tell them that they have to choose between the U.S. and the West and China,” he said. “They just have to respect what our concerns would be, our security concerns would be.”

China has its only overseas military base in the small East African nation of Djibouti.

Townsend said talks of a Chinese base in Tanzania had slowed with a change in Tanzania’s government, so China was now “soliciting for bases,” with all countries along the Mozambique Channel, to include the waterways’ small island nations. China has even discussed basing with the Somali government, which, in turn, had assured the United States it would not partner with the Chinese military, he added.

Plot to Kill Ambassador Disrupted in 2020

Townsend also said Iran had a hand in a 2020 plot “to kill the U.S. ambassador to South Africa,” following the U.S. airstrike that killed the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ elite Quds Force leader, Qasem Soleimani.

“That plot was disrupted,” he said, adding that there have been no recent plot attacks by Iran against Americans in Africa.

He said that Iran’s interest level with Africa has increased since 2020, with the United States now seeing the emergence of Iranian drones on the continent as Tehran continues to offer equipment to African nations.

 

Source: Voice Of America

SAN FRANCISCO — A Chinese navy ship stayed in the Sulu Sea southwest of the Philippines for three days, upsetting Manila. Experts say it is a part of Beijing’s effort to look after its interests in an ever-wider swath of the world’s waterways.

A People’s Liberation Army-Navy vessel worked the Sulu Sea from January 29 to February 1; according to a Monday statement from the Department of Foreign Affairs in Manila, this was an “illegal incursion.”

The Electronic Reconnaissance Ship No. 792 “entered Philippine waters without permission” and stayed even after a Philippine navy ship challenged it, the statement says.

At a March 15 news conference, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said the navy research vessel had carried out “an exercise of the right of innocent passage pursuant to UNCLOS [United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea]. The Chinese passage was safe and standard, and consistent with international law and international practice.”

The Chinese side’s comment showed no immediate intent to do more in the Sulu Sea, said Herman Kraft, a political science professor at University of the Philippines Diliman.

“Talking about innocent passage seems to be an excuse that recognizes Philippine jurisdiction over the area,” Kraft told VOA.

Sulu Sea significance

Beijing is trying to expand the reach of its growing navy to protect its maritime interests and increase bargaining power in talks with other countries, analysts have told VOA. Chinese navy ships have been spotted from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific east of Taiwan and Japan.

A naval visit to the Sulu Sea could mean Beijing wants to establish a presence in waters closer to Indonesia and Australia while buffering its South China Sea claims, analysts suggest.

“This could be China exploring a third access to Pacific, after Miyako and Bashi straits,” said Yun Sun, co-director of the East Asia program at the Stimson Center in Washington. The two straits are near Taiwan. “The U.S. apparently uses it often, so the Chinese might feel it could do the same,” Sun said.

China has protested U.S. naval presence in Asia and has said that Washington is trying to check Chinese expansion.

The People’s Liberation Army-Navy now has the ability to “operate military assets” as far off as Djibouti, said Alexander Vuving, a professor at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, in Hawaii. Like the United States, he said, China is free under international law to sail on the high seas, which are waters unclaimed by other nations.

“The strategic perspective is that Chinese naval capability is growing, so China sooner or later will send out its warships to areas outside of the first island chain and even outside the second island chain,” Vuving said. The first chain refers to the band from Russia’s Kirul Islands south to Borneo. The second includes Papua New Guinea, the Marianas and the Caroline Islands.

China’s former President Hu Jintao called in 2012 for China to become a “maritime power.” President Xi Jinping, in 2018, said it was urgent that China build a “powerful navy.” A year later, the country’s defense white paper said China needed to carry out “missions on the far seas.”

“China’s navy is viewed as posing a major challenge to the U.S. Navy’s ability to achieve and maintain wartime control of blue-water ocean areas in the Western Pacific – the first such challenge the U.S. Navy has faced since the end of the Cold War,” the U.S. Congressional Research Service said in a March 8 research note.

The Chinese military may be exploring the Sulu Sea as a detour in or out of the adjoining South China Sea in case of any conflict, Vuving said. Warships could use the Sulu Sea to launch vessels into the South China Sea or seal it off, he said.

Beijing claims most of the South China Sea. It has upset the Philippines and four other Asian governments that claim all or part of the same resource-rich, 3.5 million-square-kilometer waterway. China, backed by military and technological superiority, is building out once-uninhabited islets for hangars, radars and tiny outposts. U.S. warships periodically enter the sea as warnings to China.

As of 2012, the Chinese navy had 512 ships, according to Britain’s International Institute of Strategic Studies. It now has 777 assets, mainly seafaring vessels, the database Globalfirepower.com says.

 

Source: Voice Of America