According to some African officials, Obama Administration assertions that al-Qaeda is being diminished are bogus.

From The Washington Guardian

Key Mali lawmaker challenges Obama on al-Qaida threat

Haidara Aissata insists Africa has become to al-Qaida what Afghanistan was a decade ago, challenging U.S. assessments that the terror group has been diminished

Haidara Aissata, the only female Parliament member representing northern Mali, picked up the phone earlier this month to the anguished cries of a young mother who just learned her husband had sold the couple’s 9-year-old son to al-Qaida fighters for $40.

The boy was taken to a training camp, where he would be indoctrinated into Sharia law and fight against French troops seeking to repel al-Qaida’s grip on the African nation.

Aissata, who stands out in Mali’s male-dominated politics as much for her beauty-queen looks as her impassioned oratory, tells the story as she travels the globe these days trying to dispel the notion _ fanned by some U.S. officials _ that al-Qaida is weakened and on the decline.

To the contrary, the terror network has inspired and trained al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, along with its Western Mali off-shoot, Ansar al-Dine, and both spinoffs are gaining strength and “infecting the continent like a cancer,” Aissata tells the Washington Guardian.

Well!

“Al-Qaida is still a threat to the national security of the United States, just as it was when Osama bin Laden trained young fighters in Afghanistan — this is what is happening in Mali and other parts of Africa,” she said in an interview where she sounded alarm about the growing number of al-Qaida training camps sprouting across Africa.

“In those training camps future terror leaders are born,” she said. “Terrorism is spreading, al-Qaida is becoming stronger. The extremists don’t stay in Africa they travel to Europe and the U.S.”

Aissata just finished a tour of Europe to call attention to the rise of al-Qaida in Africa, and plans on making a similar trip to the United States next month.

Given the paucity of real veracity that has come from the left wing agenda driven “partisan politics all the time” Obama Administration, I would not discount Haidara Aissata’s assertion even one little bit.