Hiiraan Online

Counterterrorism experts meeting in Washington noted an increase in anti-Western rhetoric from groups in the Sahel, Nigeria and Somalia, but said that African militant groups were still fighting local wars.

And the United States and its allies should be cautious, they warned, of intervening in these struggles and giving African Islamists a reason to expand their campaigns to target European and American interests.

Al-Qaeda's Yemeni franchise, once locked in a local struggle, is now an international threat that has put parcel bombs on planes and trained a Nigerian to make a failed suicide attack on a passenger jet.

"The movements in Africa -- they all enjoy the Al-Qaeda brand, they love the franchise. It gives them a certain panache," said Michael Hayden, former director of the US Central Intelligence Agency.

"But I'm not sure they want to become real enemies of the United States and they want to commit to the global Islamic caliphate," he added, referring to late Al-Qaeda figurehead Osama bin Laden's goal of a single Muslim empire.

Hayden was speaking alongside other counterterrorism experts at The Jamestown Foundation's annual conference on terrorism, held Thursday.

While bin Laden lived for a while in Sudan and boasted that his fighters helped train the Somali militias to shoot down US helicopters, his successors appear to have no direct operational control of their African supporters.

Some groups, including the North African offshoot Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, had pledged allegiance to their late "sheikh," but bin Laden's deputy and successor Egyptian militant Ayman al-Zawahiri does not have the same star power.

"The jihadist movement in Africa is clearly not controlled by al-Zawahiri, if he controls anything," said Peter Pham of the Atlantic Council think tank.

"But the Al-Qaeda brand helps some local groups to distinguish themselves from other local competitors.

"It gives them a bigger sense of meaning to attract young people and in some cases the Al-Qaeda cachet helps them secure funding from overseas, especially the Gulf," he explained.

The African groups' ideological independence reflects their roots in different regional struggles, and has allowed them to latch onto and exploit causes such as Tuareg nationalism in Mali and northern Nigeria's resentment of corrupt governance.

But it also limits their real influence beyond their home areas, and even among diaspora African groups in the West.

From core Al-Qaeda's point of view, groups like the Sahel's AQIM, Somalia's Shebab and Nigeria's Boko Haram and Ansaru have a use mainly as propaganda for a movement sometimes seen as on the back foot.

"It serves al-Zawahiri to make the world believe he has more influence that he really has. He is a lonely man sitting in a house somewhere," said Pham.

"He has greater perception of impact if he can claim credit or partial credit for all these independent actors in Africa."

This view is shared by French terrorism expert Jean-Pierre Filiu, who told AFP: "There is no operational unity or coordinated command in Africa, these groups are linked only by the same style of jihadist propaganda."

So what should the West's response be? If African conflicts are left to fester, might local militias one day transform into international terror threats? Or would intervening cause them to turn their guns on the West straight away?

"The question we have to ask is: what is the appropriate way to deal with these groups?" asked Hayden, who led the CIA between 2006 and 2009.

"These guys in the tribal regions of Pakistan -- they are already committed to killing us if they can. We don't need to avoid making them an enemy, they are an enemy. There is no problem with putting an American face on dealing with that group.

"But in Africa, they are not quite global caliphate kind of folks yet, not quite targeting the US yet. So do we want to accelerate that process by too quickly putting an American face on dealing with those groups or do we want to risk waiting too long?

"It's not an easy kind of decision," he admitted.

And this caution in Washington is matched on the new African battlefields of today.

France has not hesitated to take the fight to AQIM militants in Mali nor, in recent days, to send troops to try to put a halt to fighting and massacres in the Central African Republic that could be seized upon by Islamists.

But thus far, the far bigger US military has limited itself to providing logistical support.