Eduardo González
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Arancha González Laya, will participate today in Rome in the ministerial plenary of the Global Coalition against Daesh, in which Spain will defend the “need to focus efforts” not only in Syria and Iraq, but “also in Africa”.
The meeting, co-chaired by Italy and the United States, will bring together representatives of the 83 members of the Coalition, more than half of them at ministerial level. It is the first meeting of the plenary for two years and is presented as “an opportunity to reaffirm the cohesion of the Coalition to ensure a lasting defeat of Daesh, to reaffirm the common commitment to the stabilization of the liberated areas in Syria and Iraq and to strengthen cooperation in the thematic working groups”, the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement.
The Coalition was created in 2014 to fight Daesh (also known as Islamic State or ISIS) in Syria and Iraq. However, and at Italy’s behest, the meeting will devote ample space to the fight against Daesh-affiliated organizations in other areas of the world, especially in the Sahel and various regions of Africa, “a phenomenon that has grown in size and dangerousness in recent years and poses serious risks to the security of the Mediterranean region”.
In the same sense, Arancha González Laya announced last Friday -during a joint press conference with her Iraqi counterpart, Fuad Hussein, at the Palacio de Viana in Madrid- that one of the “messages” she will take to the meeting will be the “need to focus efforts also in Africa, given that the Islamic State is spreading in the Sahel and in Sub-Saharan Africa, as we are seeing in Cabo Delgado”, in the north of Mozambique.
“I will insist on the importance of the coalition paying particular attention to the fight against ISIS terrorism” in the regions of Africa where Daesh-affiliated groups are active, she continued. “It is everyone’s fight because, at the end of the day, terrorism in one country is terrorism in all countries”, she warned. For this reason, the ministerial meeting is “a good occasion to reinforce a message of unity from the international community to defeat terrorism”, added González Laya, who stated that her presence in Rome is a reflection of Spain’s “commitment to fight the terrorism that Daesh represents wherever it is present”.
Daesh has been operating for years in the Lake Chad basin through the Islamic State in West Africa (ISWA), a splinter of Boko Haram, and in the Sahel through the Islamic State in Greater Sahara (ISGS). In addition, 2019 saw the emergence of the Islamic State in Central Africa (ISCA), which is active in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and, above all, in northern Mozambique, where it controls some territories.
