The End of Battlefields in the Age of African Terror Warfare

More than 4.500 years ago, skulking surprise attacks on vulnerable human settlements as well as on ill-defended targets, deadly ambushes, captives beheading, sexually enslaving girls and women, and ghastly mass murders on defenseless civilians were part of ancient terror warfare tactics. Today’s terror warfare borrows heavily as itsstandard signature from the hideous hallmarks of this age of extremes. As a matter of fact, modern time does not need to dispute the franchise of total war to late antiquity, as far as terror warfare is concerned. The notion of “total war” - Der Totale Krieg - coined by General Erich Ludendorff in 1935, is a late comer into an old warfare practice. What substantiates the notion of total war is that, while the laws of war are being downtrodden, the weapons used, the combatants enrolled, and the territory are increasingly being unrestricted. Terror warfare hawks have crossed the Rubicon on the African continent by embarking on a queasily familiar fatalism with total war. Today’s total war is turning into a contemporary surrogate weapon of mass destruction. Standing at a major nexus of such terror warfare, African massive defeated civilian’s bodies and millions of displaced peoples have become the new war victims with no marked battlefields to escape for security.

Unbeholden to international martial laws, global terrorist groups ushered in the era of “bombs guzzling blood” on African lands. In the fulcrum of this terror warfare shift, we have entered the twilight of traditional battlefields. The splurge of an all-consuming radical terrorist killing shifted the battle landscape towards places of worship, schools, public transportation, and marketplaces. From Kidal to Garissa, safe places that could harbor civilians are becoming the indiscriminate battlefields on this raging terror warfare.

Unsurprisingly, defenseless civilians have been bearing the heavy brunt of contemporary total war. A catalogue of horror spells out our collective failed responsibility to protect civilians within modern States. April 20, 2015 recalled the shooting and beheading of 30 Ethiopian Christians in Libya by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. On April 2, 2015, the Somali based Islamic terrorist group, al-Shabaab killed 148 students at the northern Kenyan Garissa University. In 2014, al-Shabaab militants killed 633 civilians in Somalia. According to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (Acled), Boko Haram killed 6.347 civilians in 2014. The soaring tolls of civilian deaths in African terror wars in places such as the Central African Republic, South Sudan, and Nigeria sharply rose by 30% in 2014 to 13.508 deaths. In the Central African Republic still mired in a morass of civilian killings, the Séléka and anti Balaka militias killed 1.599 civilians in 2014. The Second Sudanese Civil War (1983-2005) holds the rank of the deadliest conflict in civilian casualties since World War II, with an estimated 2 million Sudanese killed. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, at least 6 -7 million people have been killed in two decades of an unending open total warfare fronts by rebels and mushrooming militias groups. Still, Congolese women have been hanging on the cross of this total war by paying the heavy price tag of 48 women being raped every day. Shockingly, rape at gunpoint has been used as a weapon of war in the Congo, with approximately 12% of Congolese women having been raped. Thus far, women defeated bodies, girls, and children kidnapping murder spree in terror war zones have become the new battlefields of terror tactics.

Paradoxically enough, the age of high speed communication and scientific progress seems to have landed us all back into the predatory morass and violent blood orgies of the Stone Age. The revolution in communication technology and intelligence gathering along our modern costly military equipment seems inadequate a cure against the terror epidemics.

Narcisse Jean Alcide Nana is the author of the book, Démocratie A Haut Débit(Paris, Edilivre, 2014)

Bibliography
Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1977)

Mark Anderson, “Nigeria Suffers Highest Number of Civilian Deaths in African War Zones,” The Guardian, (23 January 2015)

ACLED (Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project), Conflict Trends No. 36, April 2015

Nathalie Baptiste, “The Central African Republic’s Forgotten Crisis,” in The Nation, September 11, 2014

Jo Adetunji, “Forty-Eight Women Raped Every Hour in Congo, Study Finds,” in The Guardian, 12 May, 2011