Horn of Africa May Be Next Terror Front

Militia from the Islamic Courts Union drive a machine gun mounted truck through Balad in this June 17, 2006 file picture some 40 kilometers north of the Somali capital, Mogadishu. Governments in the Horn of Africa have watched with concern as the Somali Transitional Federal Government they helped create in 2004 after two years of peace talks has been eclipsed by the Islamic Courts Union, led by an elderly cleric, Sheik Hassan Dahir Aweys, who is committed to a nationalist, Islamic regime and allegedly has ties to Ethiopian rebel groups.(AP Photo/Karel Prinsloo) (Karel Prinsloo - AP)

NAIROBI, Kenya -- From the Red Sea to Lake Victoria, the Horn of Africa is one of the few places in the world where, if careful, a traveler can move 1,400 miles across four countries without producing a passport or encountering a single government official.

These footpaths, back roads and rivers have been used for centuries by merchants and slave traders, explorers, smugglers and bandits. Rebels easily sneak around the central governments in the big cities.

So could any traveler. Even a terrorist.

Corrupt governments, porous borders, widespread poverty and discontented Muslim populations have created a region ripe for Islamic fundamentalism. The Horn of Africa, home to about 165 million people, is roughly half the area of the United States.

The six countries that make up the Horn _ Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya and Djibouti _ could become the next major front in the war on terrorism. Kenyan police earlier this year caught a smuggler trying to bring in an anti-aircraft missile.

Kenya, and Tanzania just to its south, have already been victims of al-Qaida terrorism, with the bombings at the U.S. Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998 and attacks on a hotel and an Israeli airliner in Kenya in 2002. The attacks emanated from neighboring Somalia, which has had no effective central government since 1992 and has a growing Islamic fundamentalist movement.

Western and regional diplomats, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic, said they believe another terrorist attack could be imminent.

Robert Rotberg, director of Harvard University's Program on Intrastate Conflict and Conflict Resolution, said every country in the region is at risk because radicals see an opportunity to take advantage of weak, unpopular governments.

"Governance and the standard of living are so low in that part of Africa," Rotberg said. "There is certainly a possibility of meddling in troubled waters."

Ethnic Somalis are the common denominator in the Horn of Africa, and their large presence in neighboring countries has long been a source of conflict. In the mid-1970s, then Somali President Mohamed Siad Barre advocated expanding the country's borders to unite all Somali-speaking people in Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti.

Despite a disastrous and short-lived invasion of Ethiopia in 1977 and political anarchy since 1992, Somali nationalists and Islamic fundamentalists still advocate this Greater Somalia. An ethnic-Somali insurgency continues in eastern Ethiopia, led by the Ogaden Liberation Front, a small group that mostly uses pipe bombs or small-scale attacks to advance their cause.

Governments in the Horn of Africa have watched with concern as the Somali Transitional Federal Government they helped create in 2004 after two years of peace talks has been eclipsed by the Islamic Courts Union, led by an elderly cleric, Sheik Hassan Dahir Aweys, who is committed to a nationalist, Islamic regime and allegedly has ties to Ethiopian rebel groups.