The United States and its international partners in Africa "can't see what's going on enough" to monitor increasingly violent extremist groups there, U.S. Africa Command chief Gen. David Rodriguez said Tuesday.
A lack of reconnaissance, intelligence, and surveillance assets and a lack of communications infrastructure on the sprawling continent have created gaps in Western monitoring capability there, he added.
Rodriguez's comments came in a speech to the Center for Strategic and International Studies,
the Washington Examiner reported.
The gaps are troubling because of the worsening security situation in some areas of the continent, including chaos in Libya and "increasingly lethal" attacks by Boko Haram, as the Nigeria-based jihadist group seeks to expand its activities into neighboring Chad, Cameroon and Niger.
Rodriguez said the group's gains on the battlefield are cause for concern and that "the number of people displaced is just staggering,"
AFP reported.
Rodriguez said the Nigerian military's response to Boko Haram "was not working very effectively and actually in some places made [the situation] worse."
Africom is "responsible for an area covering 54 nations that is 3.5 times the size of the U.S. and includes 15 of the State Department’s 'high-risk, high-threat' facilities," the Examiner noted.
The general said his command now has about 3,000 U.S. personnel.
Rodriguez said it Africom has had recent successes in Somalia, where partnerships and training have helped weaken Al-Shabab and improve maritime security off Somalia's coast.
No vessels were hijacked by pirates last year, Rodriguez said.
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