In February 2018, AFPC Senior Vice President Ilan Berman traveled to Morocco on a week-long research trip at the invitation of the Moroccan government. There, he visited the country’s capital, Rabat, where he held a range of meetings with government officials to discuss the evolving strategic environment in North Africa, Morocco’s foreign policy priorities, and the state of the country’s counterterrorism and counter-radicalization efforts.
Berman subsequently traveled to Marrakech to participate in the annual AfricaSEC forum, the continent’s largest national security and counterterrorism conference, on the sidelines of which he met with experts and scholars from a range of regional states in order to better gauge the security threats now prevalent in Africa.
The visit found officials in Morocco uniformly apprehensive about the current state of the continent, and the strategic challenges that confront their government. As one high-ranking government official told Berman, “Africa is approaching a dangerous moment” as a result of a confluence of strategic, economic, and political factors.
In counterterrorism terms, Moroccan officials are grappling with the growing threat to North Africa posed by the Islamic State. As the organization has come under growing pressure from the U.S. and its coalition partners in Iraq and Syria, it has made a concerted move to establish itself in other territories — including in war-torn Libya, which the organization has identified as an important “second front” in its activities. Local sources said that the group's contingent in the country is far larger than commonly understood in the West, and now stands at some "five to seven thousand people of different nationalities." Other radical actors have experienced a resurgence in Africa as well, including al-Qaeda’s regional franchise, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), and Nigeria’s radical Boko Haram movement.
The continent as a whole remains an exceedingly hospitable environment for such forces, because it is typified by lax borders, poor governance and widespread corruption — social and political conditions that are conducive to the proliferation of terrorist and criminal networks. Much of this instability is driven by economic hardship, increasing the appeal of the region’s comparatively well-resourced extremist and criminal groups.
Demographically, meanwhile, Africa's youth population (which now stands at some 224 million) is expected to increase by nearly 50 percent by the year 2030, a "potential demographic bomb" given the high levels of unemployment that continue to plague the continent.
Officials in Rabat are now looking to Washington for leadership in helping to confront this "new phase of terrorism," and see greater American involvement in the region as a critical guarantor of future stability.
