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Alan W. Dowd is a Senior Fellow with the American Security Council Foundation, where he writes on the full range of topics relating to national defense, foreign policy and international security. Dowd’s commentaries and essays have appeared in Policy Review, Parameters, Military Officer, The American Legion Magazine, The Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations, The Claremont Review of Books, World Politics Review, The Wall Street Journal Europe, The Jerusalem Post, The Financial Times Deutschland, The Washington Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Washington Examiner, The Detroit News, The Sacramento Bee, The Vancouver Sun, The National Post, The Landing Zone, Current, The World & I, The American Enterprise, Fraser Forum, American Outlook, The American and the online editions of Weekly Standard, National Review and American Interest. Beyond his work in opinion journalism, Dowd has served as an adjunct professor and university lecturer; congressional aide; and administrator, researcher and writer at leading think tanks, including the Hudson Institute, Sagamore Institute and Fraser Institute. An award-winning writer, Dowd has been interviewed by Fox News Channel, Cox News Service, The Washington Times, The National Post, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and numerous radio programs across North America. In addition, his work has been quoted by and/or reprinted in The Guardian, CBS News, BBC News and the Council on Foreign Relations. Dowd holds degrees from Butler University and Indiana University. Follow him at twitter.com/alanwdowd.

ASCF News

Scott Tilley is a Senior Fellow at the American Security Council Foundation, where he writes the “Technical Power” column, focusing on the societal and national security implications of advanced technology in cybersecurity, space, and foreign relations.

He is an emeritus professor at the Florida Institute of Technology. Previously, he was with the University of California, Riverside, Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute, and IBM. His research and teaching were in the areas of computer science, software & systems engineering, educational technology, the design of communication, and business information systems.

He is president and founder of the Center for Technology & Society, president and co-founder of Big Data Florida, past president of INCOSE Space Coast, and a Space Coast Writers’ Guild Fellow.

He has authored over 150 academic papers and has published 28 books (technical and non-technical), most recently Systems Analysis & Design (Cengage, 2020), SPACE (Anthology Alliance, 2019), and Technical Justice (CTS Press, 2019). He wrote the “Technology Today” column for FLORIDA TODAY from 2010 to 2018.

He is a popular public speaker, having delivered numerous keynote presentations and “Tech Talks” for a general audience. Recent examples include the role of big data in the space program, a four-part series on machine learning, and a four-part series on fake news.

He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Victoria (1995).

Contact him at stilley@cts.today.

Senegal Asks China to Help Fight Jihadists

Wednesday, December 1, 2021

Categories: ASCF News Terrorism

Comments: 0

Source: https://www.breitbart.com/africa/2021/11/30/senegal-asks-china-help-fight-jihadists/

TAUSEEF MUSTAFA/AFP via Getty Images

Senegal welcomes “China’s influence” to help combat Islamist terrorism throughout the country and its surrounding region of West Africa, Senegal Foreign Minister Aissata Tall Sall told reporters at a summit with her Chinese counterpart in Dakar on Sunday.

“We would like China’s influence to be a strong voice in support of Senegal and all the countries involved in the problem of insecurity in the Sahel, so that our forces there have even more legal means to fight against terrorists and irredentism, and we hope that China will accompany us,” Sall said at a press conference on November 28 in Dakar, Senegal’s national capital, shortly after meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi for bilateral talks.

Sall and Wang’s in-person meeting on Sunday preceded the start of a two-day China-Africa summit hosted by Senegal this week due to conclude on Tuesday. The Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) is focused on “trade matters as well as security” this year, according to Radio France Internationale (RFI).

“DR Congo’s President Felix Tshisekedi, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa are expected to attend the summit in Senegal,” according to RFI.

Senegal is located in West Africa along the continent’s Atlantic Ocean coast. The nation belongs to the African Sahel region, along with neighboring Mali, Guinea, Mauritania, and Guinea-Bissau. The territory also includes portions of other African states including Burkina Faso, Algeria, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Sudan, and Eritrea. The Sahel is a geographic zone that spans the width of the African continent along the southern rim of the Sahara Desert. It has suffered from terrorist attacks by Islamist militants since 2015 despite concerted efforts by the United Nations (U.N.) and France to help combat the insurgency. Violent jihadist activity in the Sahel has increased since 2018.

Jihadists linked to Islamist terror organizations such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and al-Qaeda regularly target civilians and government soldiers as part of a jihadist insurgency in the Sahel. The campaign has killed hundreds of people and displaced at least 1.2 million more, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). The violence has forced over 2,200 schools in Burkina Faso to shut down in recent years affecting “over 300,000 children,” the U.N. reports.

“With Chad’s withdrawal of troops and the imminent reduction in French troop strength from the vast Sahel region of West Africa — where jihadist groups continue to stage attack after attack, targeting civilians and soldiers without discrimination — new anti-terror tactics are afoot,” the BBC observed on September 4.

The global “war on terror” has increasingly shifted to “a new frontline in Africa,” Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari warned in an August 15 op-ed published by the Financial Times.

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