Al Qaeda’s Franchise in Africa

More than a year ago, I inaugurated this column with an essay whose title – “The War on Terrorism's Forgotten Front” – laid out what has been one of the recurring themes of this series. As I noted:

The Bush administration's 2002 National Security Strategy…acknowledged that conditions in sub-Saharan Africa threaten “both a core value of the United States – preserving human dignity – and our strategic priority – combating terror,” while the new 2006 National Security Strategy affirmed that “Africa holds growing geo-strategic importance and is a high priority” for America. What is needed, however, is not rhetoric but action: already terrorist networks, forced out elsewhere, have found refuge among Africa's weak or failed states.

The announcement two weeks ago by the U.S. Department of Defense that a “dangerous terror suspect” by the name of Abdullahi Sudi Arale had been transferred to the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is but the latest confirmation that indeed al Qaeda and our other foes – as I noted in another column last year in which I reported on a remarkable jihadi strategy document “Al Qaeda is Moving to Africa” – “are already setting their sights on Africa as the venue of choice for future operational bases, especially as they continue to be rooted out of Afghanistan, Iraq, the Arabian peninsula.” Arale, who served as a courier between the al Qaeda network in Pakistan and what intelligence officials have dubbed “East Africa Al Qaeda” (EAAQ), was captured in Somalia where, since he returned from South Asia last September, he has been part of the leadership of the al Qaeda-linked Islamic Courts Union.

A June 6 Pentagon statement stated that “there is significant information available indicating that Arale has been assisting various EAAQ-affiliated extremists in acquiring weapons and explosives, and has facilitated terrorist travel by providing false documents for [al Qaeda] and EAAQ-affiliates and foreign fighters traveling into Somalia.”

Officials said that Arale had “played a significant role in the reemergence” of the Somali Islamists, which I have recently reported in this column space along with observations about their adoption of some of the “same non-conventional tactics that foreign jihadis and Sunni Arab insurgents have used to great effect in Iraq.”

Arale is now in with other high-value detainees in Cuba where, as I had occasion to observe during my recent visit and meetings with officials at the Joint Task Force-Guantanamo (JTF-GTMO), he will be given the opportunity to examine an unclassified précis of the evidence to contest his enemy combatant status.

Whatever the final disposition in this high-value detainee's particular case, it is clear that he is but the proverbial tip of the iceberg. However, while most of America's counterterrorism attention and effort in Africa has been focused on the subregion of the Horn, increasing attention needs to be focused on the Sahel, the critical boundary region between Sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa, also known as the Maghreb, where, as I noted several months ago, “the extreme poverty of and simmering ethnic tensions within the region, when compounded on the general weakness of its governments, render the terrain especially fertile for extremist penetration.”

Testifying on Capitol Hill the very day the Pentagon announced across town that Arale had been transferred, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs David Welch, told the House Committee on Foreign Affairs that “the threat from al Qaeda's presence in the region is significant, very dangerous and potentially growing in a couple of cases,” citing “the number of spectacular terrorist attacks in the region has risen, terrorist groups are using tactics and attacking targets that they had previously avoided, and terror cells have been discovered in places where they had not been seen before” as well as “evidence that the region's terrorist groups are increasingly attempting to build ties with each other and with the global jihadist network.”

The current challenge is centered in a hard core of the Algerian Islamist terrorist organization Salafist Group for Call and Combat (usually known by its French acronym GSPC).

The GSPC itself was founded in the late 1990s as a splinter off of the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), itself a militant offshoot of Algeria's main Islamist movement, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), which had fought a bitter civil war in which at least 150,000 people were killed after elections in which FIS was leading were voided. The founder of the GSPC, Hassan Hattab was a GIA regional commander who did not join the estimated 85 percent of the fighters who had laid down their arms after a 1999 amnesty law.

Ironically, Hattab was himself subsequently deposed as “national emir” of the GSPC for allegedly not being radical enough and replaced by Nabil Sahraoui, a.k.a. Mustapha Abou Ibrahim, who was killed in shootout with Algerian army. Sahraoui's successor as “emir,” Abu Musab Abdul Wadud, last year pledged his allegiance to “Sheikh Osama” and al Qaeda and the GSPC began signing its communiqués “Al Qaeda Organization in the Islamic Maghreb” (AQIM).

The link to al Qaeda was confirmed by Osama bin Laden's deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri who, in the “commemorative video” the terrorist group issued on the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, declared: “Our mujahid Sheikh and the Lion of Islam, Osama bin Laden,…has instructed me to give the good news to Muslims in general and my mujahidin brothers everywhere that the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat has joined al Qaeda organization.” The Egyptian terrorist hailed the “blessed union” between the GSPC and al Qaeda, pledging that it would “be a source of chagrin, frustration and sadness for the apostates [of the regime in Algeria], the treacherous sons of [former colonial power] France,” and urging the group to become “a bone in the throat of the American and French crusaders” in the region and beyond.

Since then, the GSPC which, according to sources in French intelligence who have closely monitored the terrorist group, had been losing momentum as result both of defections from members who had taken advantage of a recent amnesty offer and losses in battle with better trained and coordinated counterterrorism forces, appears to have been reinvigorated by its “rebranding” as al Qaeda's newest franchise operation. The stepped-up attacks of AQIM over the past year include:

• October 30, 2006: Simultaneous truck bomb attacks on police stations in the Algiers suburb of Dergana and the town of Reghaia, 30 kilometers east of the Algerian capital, killed three people and wounded two dozen.

   

• December 10, 2006: An explosive device went off next to a bus carrying foreign oil workers in an upscale Algiers suburb, killing two people and wounding eight others.

   

• February 13, 2007: Seven bombs were detonated within a period of six hours in a string of towns in the districts of Bourmerdes and Tizi-Ouzou east of Algiers, killing six people and wounding thirteen.

   

• April 11, 2007: A car driven by a suicide bomber attacked the Prime Minister Abdelaziz Belkhadem's office in downtown Algiers while two others simultaneously detonated themselves near a police station in the Bab Ezzouar neighborhood. At least twenty-three people were killed and hundreds of others wounded in what were the first bombings in the Algerian capital proper in several years.

  While the attacks clearly point to a worrying upward spiral in terrorist activities, counterterrorism officials have also scored a number of successes. On April 26, for example, Samier Moussab, a.k.a. Samir Saïoud, AQIM's number two, was killed in a clash with security forces in Si Moustapha, about 50 kilometers east of Algiers. The dead terrorist's body was identified by former militants who had accepted an amnesty offered by the Algerian government to end the civil strife of the 1990s. The hunting down of Saïoud recalled the spectacular capture two years ago of Amari Saïfi, a former Algerian army officer-turned-GSPC leader better known by his nom de guerre Abderrazak al-Para (“the paratrooper”) who was responsible for the daring 2003 kidnapping of thirty-two European tourists. Al-Para was caught after an unprecedented U.S.-coordinated pursuit involving U.S. Navy P-3C Orion long range surveillance aircraft across the open deserts of four Sahelian countries.

   

  The increasing effectiveness of Algerian and other government forces in the subregion owes a great deal to a pair of innovative U.S.-back multilateral efforts. In 2002, the State Department launched the Pan-Sahel Initiative (PSI), a modest effort to provide border security and other counterterrorism assistance to Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger using personnel from U.S. Army Special Forces attached to the Special Operations Command Europe (SOCEUR) of the U.S. European Command (EUCOM). As a follow-up to PSI, the State Department-funded Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Initiative (TSCTI) was launched in 2005 with support from the Department of Defense's Operation Enduring Freedom-Trans Sahara (OEF-TS). TSCTI added Algeria, Nigeria, Morocco, Senegal, and Tunisia to the original four PSI countries. [In addition to the military-led efforts, the Sahel countries have also received support from State Department programs – especially the Anti-Terrorism Assistance (ATA) program and the Terrorist Interdiction Program (TIP) – and other U.S. government agencies, including the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Department of the Treasury.] In addition to beefing up the counterterrorism capacities of participating nations, the Trans-Sahara initiative encourages them to coordinate their efforts, recognizing that AQIM terrorists are pursuing a regional strategy.

  While the geophysical and meteorological conditions in the Sahel – to say nothing of the Sahara Desert itself – are notoriously unforgiving, al Qaeda's desire to locate an offshoot there is not without its own logic. The extreme poverty and simmering ethnic tensions within the region, compounded with the difficulties faced by of governments trying to assert their authority across the sparsely populated terrain, render it an especially inviting target. Furthermore, the millions that have been channeled over the years by Saudi and other Gulf Arab governments and private donors to fund mosques and madrasas teaching their version of Islam over the years have, however unintentionally, already seeded the ground for the extremists. Finally, the former GSPC has an extensive network among the North African immigrant communities in France, Spain, and other Western European countries which al Qaeda, by lending its “brand name” to the group, can now avail itself of in return. In a report published last week by the Jamestown Foundation's Terrorism Monitor, for example, analyst Kathryn Haahr notes that Spanish police sources believe that jihadis recruited in their country are already training in AQIM camps in Mali, Mauritania, and Niger, presumably for future mission in Europe. Similarly, the Algerian daily La Tribune reported last week that authorities have uncovered an elaborate Moroccan-based network that smuggled cannabis into Spain and with the proceeds from the drug sales, purchased Eastern European-manufactured arms for AQIM.

  As the announcement earlier this year of the creation of a unified combatant command for Africa (AFRICOM) underscored, the United States has a major stake in the security, stability, and development of Africa. However, al Qaeda and other terrorist groups are expanding rapidly their presence on the continent. The new challenges which are posed by these terror networks in the region require flexible responses. We need to increase technical assistance to help allied governments in the Sahel and Maghreb increase their ability to police their own territory and enhance their collaboration with each other in tracking and blocking terrorist activity that is no respecter of borders. This type of partnership also serves a longer-term objective which African nations have made their own: the increasing integration of countries within subregions and across the continent as a whole. Since al Qaeda's new African affiliate is a local, regional, and intercontinental franchise operation, it will only be beaten by a competitive effort that has similarly integrated and forward-looking strategic perspective.

  – J. Peter Pham is Director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs and a Research Fellow of the Institute for Infrastructure and Information Assurance at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He is also an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C.