This article by the New York Times is a testament to the growing importance of efforts to stabalize such volatile regions, as the influence of terrorist groups continues to spread at a dangerous rate.
WASHINGTON — Al Qaeda’s affiliate in North Africa has carried out a string of slayings, bombings and other lethal attacks against Westerners and African security forces in recent weeks that have raised fears the terrorist group may be turning a more deadly corner.
American and European security counterterrorism officials say that the attacks may signal the return of foreign fighters from the battlefields of Iraq, where they honed their bomb-making skills. The attacks also reflect Al Qaeda’s growing tentacles in the northern tier of Africa, outside the group’s main sanctuary in Pakistan’s tribal areas, the officials say.
In just the past month, the group has claimed credit for killing a kidnapped British hostage in Mali, killing an American aid worker in Mauritania, murdering a senior Malian army officer in his home and ambushing a convoy of nearly two dozen Algerian paramilitary forces.
Last weekend, fighters from the Algeria-based affiliate, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, ambushed a Malian army patrol in Mali’s northern desert, killing nearly a dozen soldiers and capturing several others, American military officials said. Several militants were also killed.
Assessing the militant threat in North Africa is complicated. Some security and counterterrorism officials say the group is more a criminal gang — ransoming kidnapped Westerners for millions of dollars to finance their operations — than ideologically committed terrorists. Other terrorism officials point to the attacks as evidence of the group’s intent to expand its longtime antigovernment insurgency in Algeria to other North African countries and possibly Europe, where the group has financial and logistical supporters.
“AQIM has become much stronger in Algeria and Mauritania, and the killing of the British hostage and the American is a message they are not only concentrating on Maghreb issues, they are now part of the global jihad,” said a senior French counterterrorism official, using the acronym for the group’s name.
Last week, the leader of the Qaeda wing, Abdelmalek Droukdal, threatened a “flagrant war” against France in retaliation for an effort by France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, to ban burqas, the head-to-toe garments, in the republic, calling them a symbol of “enslavement.”
The recent surge in violence has been less audacious than the group’s attack in December 2007, in which suicide bombers struck the United Nations and court offices in Algiers, killing 41 people and wounding 170 others. But some American intelligence analysts say there are initial signs that small numbers of foreign fighters from North Africa who fought in Iraq are returning home.
“Is there a threat? There sure is a threat,” Gen. William E. Ward, the head of the United States Africa Command, told reporters in Dakar, Senegal, recently.
Still other officials say the mayhem may be partly the result of an increasingly vicious rivalry between two Qaeda subcommanders in Mali — Mokhtar Belmokhtar and Abdelhamid Abu Zeid — a clash that underscores the kind of autonomous jihad cells that counterterrorism officials say are particularly hard to combat.
Lauren C. Ploch, an Africa specialist with the Congressional Research Service, said that the extremist Islamist ideology of Al Qaeda was unlikely to garner much sympathy or traction with the populations in the states of the Sahel belt, the southern boundary of the Sahara.
“Nevertheless,” Ms. Ploch said, “the vast spaces in northern Mali, Mauritania, Niger, and southern Algeria are extremely difficult to police, so it’s quite possible that we may see surges in extremist activity in certain countries depending on how well their neighbors are able to control their own territories.”
The group originated in the 1990s to fight Algeria’s secular government, and in 2007 it renamed itself from the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. It singled out Western targets even before the name change. In December 2006, militants in Algeria bombed a bus carrying workers with an affiliate of Halliburton, the American oil services company. A year later, gunmen wielding AK-47 rifles killed four French tourists in Mauritania.
The latest spate of violence began when the Qaeda group killed a Briton, Edwin Dyer, on May 31, one day after the expiration of its second deadline for its demand to be met. He had been taken hostage on Jan. 22 along with a Swiss citizen and two other tourists in Niger, close to the border with Mali, and was held in Mali.
The group demanded the release of Abu Qatada, a Jordanian-born Palestinian cleric held in Britain whom a Spanish judge has called the leading Qaeda lieutenant in Europe, as well as $14 million for Mr. Dyer and the Swiss national.
About two weeks later, gunmen in northern Mali killed a senior Malian army intelligence officer who had arrested several members of the Qaeda group, which uses the vast northern Malian desert as a staging area and support base.
Within days, Malian army forces retaliated, capturing a militant base near the Algerian border and killing more than two dozen fighters, according to Malian media reports.
At about the same time in neighboring Algeria, militants using roadside bombs and automatic rifles ambushed a convoy of paramilitary police about 110 miles east of Algiers, killing 18 members of the security forces.
Algerian security forces have long battled the Islamist militants, but security officials they are also now offering military and intelligence support to poorer neighboring countries like Mali, where the insurgents have sought refuge.
“With the kidnappings impacting on Mali’s tourism industry, the country seems to be taking the situation more seriously and the Algerians are offering more support,” said Jeremy Binnie, a senior analyst at Jane’s Terrorism & Insurgency Center.
General Ward, the American commander in Africa, said in response to the killings that Army Green Berets would redouble training efforts under way with several regional militaries to improve their counterterrorism abilities.
In Europe, the authorities are eyeing Al Qaeda’s North African wing warily, expressing concern about its threats to attack European countries that have deployed troops to Afghanistan.
“What we see here is indeed a lot of logistic support from people who are active in Maghreb,” one Belgian security official said. “They are collecting money, faking papers and giving safe haven. They are active in indoctrination and radicalization of people and sending them for training.”
But these officials have mixed views on whether the group can strike outside Africa.
“We don’t rule out that Al Qaeda will try to attack us and then AQIM would play probably an important role,” said August Hanning, state secretary of the German Interior Ministry. “But we see an increase of danger for German interests in North Africa and the Sahel.”
