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WORLD> Middle East
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Rice to visit Libya and North African allies
(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-09-05 09:29 ALGIERS, Algeria -- US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice makes a historic trip to North Africa this week as the highest-ranking US official to visit Libya in half a century. In another first, she is touring other regional allies that have emerged as a simmering battlefront in the fight against terrorism.
Rice reaches Tripoli on Friday, meeting with Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi and other top officials in what the State Department calls a landmark trip opening a new era in relations between the United States and the oil-rich country. She's the first secretary of state to visit Libya since John Foster Dulles in 1953 and the highest-ranking American to go there since Vice President Richard Nixon in 1957. Islamist militants have strongly shifted their attention to the region. Algeria in particular has seen a surge of terrorist attacks since an extremist group left over from a civil war in the 1990s publicly joined Osama bin Laden's terror network in 2006 under the name Al-Qaida in Islamic North Africa. In August, more than 100 people were killed in Algerian terrorist violence, and neighboring Morocco has also dismantled half a dozen terrorist cells this year. Meanwhile, one of the key tasks of the new Africa Command created by the Pentagon is to track militant groups and traffickers in the lawless Sahara, where there are fears that al-Qaida could be establishing new bases. Rice is due to spend only a few hours in Algiers on Saturday. Militants have not been able to operate in the capital -- tightly controlled by army checkpoints -- since bombings in December 2007 killed 41 people, including UN workers. |
