The primary African focus of the U.S. military and the Central Intelligence Agency has been on the eastern Indian Ocean seaboard, particularly strife-torn Somalia and neighboring Kenya, where al-Qaida cells are known to operate.

Their most spectacular operation was the twin bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es Salaam, capital of Tanzania, in August 1998 in which more than 200 people, mainly Africans, were killed.

But al-Qaida's Algerian arm, now known as al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, the Arabic name for North Africa, has been gathering strength and moving southward into the Sahel desert belt in Mali, Senegal, Mauritania and Niger.

These are the "ungovernable spaces" in Africa into which American security strategists believe al-Qaida seeks to move in an effort to open a new front in the global jihad against the West.

Until recently, U.S. administrations had paid scant attention to Africa following the end of the Cold War, in which the continent had been a proxy battleground between East and West.

That all changed with the discovery of vast new oil fields in West Africa, all the way down the Atlantic seaboard from Mauritania to Angola.

As the United States seeks to reduce its dependence on Middle Eastern oil, it needs to secure supplies from Africa, even if that means dealing with some of the continent's most notorious regimes.

Enter the U.S. military's New Africa Command, or AFRICOM. It was inaugurated in 2008, with headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany.

Its stated mission is to help stabilize a continent that is continually at war and promote good governance. But many Africans see it as little more than a military shield to protect American strategic interests.

In recent years, a jihadist organization has also emerged in Nigeria, Africa's second-largest oil producer and its most populous country, triggering bloody clashes.

In the latest eruption, 38 people were killed in the northern city of Bauchi on Monday.

In July 800 people were killed when Nigerian forces crushed an Islamist uprising in Bauchi and other parts of the Muslim-dominated region by a radical sect, Boko Haram. It seeks to overthrow the federal government and impose strict Islamic law.

The government claimed to have crushed the sect in 2004, but it has re-emerged even stronger than before. Osama bin Laden is the radicals' hero.

Nigeria's 150 million people are roughly divided equally between Muslims in the north and Christians in the south, with Muslims traditionally the dominant group.

In recent years southern militants have waged a rebellion that has hit hardest in the Niger Delta, Nigeria's oil-producing region. Oil production has been cut by one-third to around 2 million barrels a day.

U.S. analysts fear that if the government of Nigeria, a key exporter to the United States, continues to lose control, Islamic militants will be able to threaten a strategic U.S. asset.

The turbulent Horn of Africa on the continent's eastern edge, a battleground since the 1970s, has long been a worry to the United States.

Somalia has been riven by clan-based warfare since dictator Siad Barre was overthrown by warlords in 1991 and is now a sanctuary for Islamist radicals, including al-Qaida, seeking to take over the country.

On Sept. 14 helicopter-borne U.S. Navy SEALs assassinated Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a prominent al-Qaeda figure.

That audacious daylight strike marked a departure from the air and missile strikes the Americans have used in the past against leaders of Somalia's jihadists, the most recent in 2008.

It prompted Stars and Stripes, the U.S. military's newspaper, to wonder in its Sept. 25 issue whether that "hands-on, high-risk Somalia mission is a harbinger of things to come for the new U.S. Africa Command, which until now has stressed cooperation, not commando raids, in its dealings with African nations."

The killing of Nabhan ran counter to AFRICOM's stated purpose of promoting stability through military training partnerships intended to make African armies more professional.

"Yet," said Stars and Stripes, "such raids may reveal a hidden iron fist at the heart of the U.S. military mission in Africa."

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