Al-Qa’eda has relocated to Africa

There has been general shock at the attempted downing of Northwest Airlines flight 253 over Detroit. It isn’t just that yet another aeroplane terrorist atrocity was averted only by luck and courage after US and British intelligence were caught with their pants down once again. Nor is it just the lax airport security.

No, the real amazement has been that the perpetrator, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, is a Nigerian who apparently got his orders from al-Qa’eda in Yemen; that the genesis of the pants bomber’s radical journey lies not in Iraq or Afghanistan, nor in Israel/Palestine, but in Africa.

It was while at school in Toga that Abdulmutallab reportedly adopted the most belligerent version of Islam. As a fully fledged Islamic extremist, he was naturally received with open arms in Londonistan, where he was further radicalised to terrorism before being kitted out in Yemen with the latest accessories of mass murder.

He is first and foremost a religious fanatic — and the crucial context for his extremism is Africa. Radical Islamists in countries such as Abdulmutallab’s Nigeria, Somalia or the Sudan have been steadily butchering, ethnically cleansing or brutally converting Christians and other ‘infidels’, imposing sharia law at gunpoint and radicalising the continent to the cause of Islamic holy war.

British intelligence has already warned that British Muslims are being recruited into terror in Somalia. Now we learn of a steady stream of Britons being trained in terrorist camps in Yemen. A group called ‘Al-Qa’eda in the Arabian Peninsula’ has vowed ‘all out war on the crusaders’ and the ‘enemies of God’.

African countries such as Yemen have long had troubling jihadi connections. What has changed recently is that al-Qa’eda has transferred its centre of gravity there, along with Somalia and the Maghreb.