Al-Qaeda Sahara Network Spurs U.S. to Train Chad, Mali Forces

Analyzing the veritable “surge” last summer in attacks launched by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), I suggested in this column space that both the rhetoric of the group and the threat it actually poses were likely to continue to grow. However, the terrorist group's increasing involvement in criminal activities, especially the kidnapping of foreigners for ransom, has led some to conclude that, as Michael Petrou memorably summarized it in an article last week in the Canadian news magazine Maclean's, “AQIM militants of late have appeared more like members of a desert biker gang than vanguard holy warriors poised to restore an Islamic caliphate across the Middle East.” While undoubtedly a shift is occurring within AQIM, this may signal a more – rather than less – dangerous development in the evolution of the group.

AQIM popped back in the news recently with the release of Robert Fowler, a former Canadian ambassador to the United Nations who was serving as a special envoy for UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon when he and another Canadian diplomat, Louis Guay, were kidnapped some 45 kilometers north of Niamey, Niger, on December 14, 2008. The two diplomats were finally released on April 21, 2009, along with two European tourists who had been kidnapped separately, German Marianne Petzold and Swiss Gabriella Greitner. The release came as part of a complicated deal involving the payment of a ransom, reported to be about $8 million by still undisclosed parties (both the United Nations and the Canadian government deny contributing to it), and the release of a number of AQIM militants held by the government of Mali.

This was not the first high profile kidnapping carried out by AQIM. In February 2003, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (usually known by its French acronym GSPC, Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat), as the organization hailed itself at the time, kidnapped thirty-two European tourists traveling across the Sahara. One died in captivity, while seventeen were rescued by Algerian military forces in May of that year; the remaining fourteen hostages were released in August 2003 after the German government paid about $10 million in ransom.

Five years later, in February 2008, two Austrian tourists vacationing in Tunisia, Andrea Kloiber and Wolfgang Ebner, were kidnapped by AQIM. According to reports in the Algerian press, the couple was moved more than 1,000 kilometers from where they were kidnapped and held in the Oued Zouak area where the borders of Algeria, Mali, and Niger meet until their release in November 2008, following the Austrian government's payment of a ransom said to have been in excess of $5 million.

One element which these three separate incidents have in common is the involvement of Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a.k.a. Khaled Abou al-Abbas, a.k.a. Laâouar (“one-eyed”), who has emerged not only as the leader of the AQIM's operations in the Sahel, but also its most effective field commander. After playing a secondary role in supporting Amari Saïfi, a former Algerian army officer-turned-GSPC leader better known by his nom de guerre Abderrazak al-Para (“the paratrooper”), who led the 2003 operation, Belmokhtar assumed the leading role in the two subsequent hostage crises following al-Para's capture in a coordinated operation involving military forces trained as part of the United States-led Pan-Sahel Initiative.

That Belmokhtar, an alumnus of al-Qaeda's Afghan training camps at Khalden and Jalalabad as well as a veteran of Algeria's jihadist violence during the 1990s, has been able to emerge in such a pivotal role despite what one analyst writing last week in the Jamestown Foundation's Terrorism Monitor described as his “being at odds with AQIM amir Abdelmalek Droukdel,” including “even going so far as to criticize Droukdel's leadership of the organization,” is due to the increasingly decentralized nature of the extremist group as a whole as it has sought to adapt itself to the changing conditions in its Algerian base where robust anti-terrorism measures and better counterinsurgency efforts have led to large numbers of the militants being killed or captured while amnesty programs have whittled away even more of the group's strength. Just within the past week, four AQIM members were killed in by Algerian troops in two separate incidents last Thursday at Maatkas, in the Tizi Ouzou province of the northern Kabylie region, and at Kharrouba, near Boumerdès, 50 kilometers east of the capital of Algiers. Last Friday, three former GSPC leaders – Omar Abdelber, Abu Zakaria and Mosaab Abu Daoud – went on national radio to appeal to their onetime comrades-in-arms to lay down their weapons and accept a government offer of amnesty. According to the three, no less a figure than the captive Amari Saïfi had recently penned a letter in praise of the “national reconciliation” policy of rehabilitating and pardoning surrendered jihadists promoted by President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who was reelected last month to a third five-year term with what official results put as over 90 percent of the vote.

Thus AQIM's surviving core membership has come to understand that the real initiative in recruitment and operations must come from regional units, rather than an embattled and increasingly ineffectual central command structure. However, of the three principal regional units, the central one in Algeria has been considerably weakened as has the eastern one along the Algerian frontier with Tunisia and Libya, which had been formed when the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) aligned itself with al-Qaeda and also includes Tunisian Islamists. Consequently, the regional unit led by Belmokhtar operating along Algeria's southern border with Niger and Mali was left as AQIM's most effective katiba (“brigade”).

The links which Belmokhtar has forged with local communities in the harsh desert environment, including the fabled nomadic “blue men” of the Tuareg, have been the key to his success. According to Colonel El Hadj Gamou, commander of Mali's first military region, speaking in an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro two years ago, following his intermediary role in resolving the 2003 kidnapping of the European tourists, Belmokhtar was granted de facto asylum in Mali: “We promised him we would leave him alone under the condition that he did not carry out hostile actions on our soil.” Belmokhtar used the opportunity to get married, taking as his first bride a young Malian woman from an Arab family in Timbuktu. According to a report last month in the Bamako, Mali newspaper L'Aube, he subsequently also took additional wives from Tuareg and Brabiche Arab tribes. The marital alliances helped gain him entrée into the smuggling and other extralegal activities for which the region is infamous. While Belmokhtar clearly profited personally from these criminal enterprises – Le Figaro described the herds of livestock which he accumulated, while a report two weeks ago in the Moroccan newspaper Al Bayane described him as “controlling the majority of the traffic in arms, cigarette, drug, and stolen car in southern Algeria and the Sahel” as well as having a hand in human trafficking – he also used the desert routes and smuggling networks to funnel arms to his fellow jihadists in northern Algeria.

According to an article in the current issue of Circunstancia by Anneli Botha, a Pretoria-based senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies, the safe haven Belmokhtar acquired also enabled AQIM to establish “mobile training camps, in particular those in northern Mali [which] provided training to nationals as far south as Nigeria, nationals from neighboring countries, other countries in West Africa, as well as individuals recruited in Europe.” As a result, “GSPC/AQIM migrated from a domestic to a transnational terror group.” In fact, recent years have seen the opening by AQIM of a “southern front” targeting not just the Algerian government, but other states in the subregion. Incidents, in addition to the kidnappings mentioned earlier, include:

the June 4, 2005 attack on a military base in Mreiti, Mauritania, led by Belmokhtar himself, which left fifteen soldiers dead;
the Christmas Eve 2007 attack on a vacationing French family near Aleg, Mauritania, which killed four members of the family and left the father seriously wounded (see my report last year on the incident);
the February 1, 2008 assault on the Israeli embassy in the Mauritanian capital of Nouakchott and an adjoining nightclub, which left half a dozen wounded, including three foreigners;
and the September 15, 2009 ambush of a Mauritanian military convoy near the remote northern village of Tourine, which resulting in the capture and beheading of eleven soldiers and one civilian.
Last month, the Europol, the European Union law enforcement organization that handles criminal intelligence, released its annual EU Terrorism Situation and Trend Report. Assessing the trends the new document noted the seriousness of the threat:

As in past years, AQIM continued to consider the Algerian government and all western nations as potential targets and threatened to perpetrate more attacks on western interests. It claimed to have expanded its activities to neighboring states in the Maghreb and the Sahel and to have recruited members from as far south as Nigeria. In online statements and videos, AQIM's leader commented on the situation in Libya, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia. Special interest was placed on Mauritania.

Similarly, regional governments have been reacting to the challenge that AQIM is posing to them all and have intensified security links between themselves. For example, in the wake of an AQIM attack on the Mauritanian convoy near Tourine last year, the government of Morocco sent military advisors to Mauritania to provide the government there with training and advice on force protection and patrol tactics. Just last week Mali's President Amadou Toumani Touré called again for regional action against the threat and dispatched his defense minister to confer with Algeria's President Bouteflika, who has dispatched weapons, fuel, and other materiel to his neighbor. Over the weekend, the Malian military deployed three combat units to Kidal, a town on the border with Algeria and Niger, after one of Belmoktar's convoys was spotted in the vicinity. Analysts believe that the two countries, along with two other charter members of the Pan Sahel Initiative, Mauritania and Niger, will soon mount joint operations.

In short, the states in the region certainly do not view AQIM as a spent force, an assessment reinforced by the U.S. State Department's Country Reports on Terrorism 2008, released two weeks ago, which noted that “in the north and west of the [African] continent, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb…expanded the scope of its terrorist operations in the Sahel” using “isolated and remote areas of northern Mali as a safe haven” while “the lawless eastern and northern regions of Mauritania were [also] a haven for smugglers and terrorists.”

These developments suggest that the Saharan/Sahelian brigade of AQIM may be succeeding where the central leadership of the organization, notwithstanding its “rebranding” as al-Qaeda's authorized “franchise” in North Africa, has failed: shedding an almost exclusively Algerian orientation in order to take on a broader Maghrebi identity. Moreover, the manner in which Belmokhtar has integrated himself into the social fabric of his chosen theater of operation represents a not insignificant advance from ad hoc cooperation between terrorists and criminals to a convergence, if not transformation, of the two spheres of activity. The question vexing many analysts is whether AQIM will seek to expand its reach, both criminal and terrorist, into the large North African diaspora communities in Europe. Taken together, all of these factors suggest that far from being crippled, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb may be evolving into an even greater challenge to security not only in Africa, but well beyond.

J. Peter Pham is Director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C., as well as Vice President of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA).