ICG report on the Sahel region

ICG has another report out, this one on terrorism in the Sahel (Mali, Niger, Chad, Mauritania, etc) region of North Africa. The issue of North African (and particularly Algerian) terrorism has been one that I've been interested in for quite some time now and apparently some of my previous posts on the subject apparently helped to inspire a chapter in Richard Miniter's Shadow War, which I now shamelessly promote.

In contrast to some of my problems with the ICG report on Iranian influence on Iraq, in which I think the conclusions of the report ignored some of the evidence presented within it (elements of the IRCG are supporting Sadr and Ansar al-Islam, but there's no proof that Iran is backing the insurgency - huh?), but all in all I think that this one is pretty good. Thankfully, the issue of North African terrorism has yet to be politicized the way that anything to do with Iraq (and to a lesser extent Iran) have been over the last couple years. I'm going through the information rather the recommendations contained in the report since I'm more interested in the information rather than the ICG recommendations, which are fairly easily accessible in summarized form on their website.

With all that in mind, let us begin, shall we?

• Introduction
• West African Islam Primer
• Political Specificities: Mauritania
• Political Specificities: Mail
• Political Specificities: Niger
• Political Specificities: Chad

Introduction

• On March 9, 2004, GSPC members battled troops from Niger and Chad backed by US Special Forces just inside the Chadian border. When the fighting was over, 43 GSPC fighters were dead, not only Algerians but also Islamists from Mali, Niger, and Nigeria. This marked the first major success of the Pan-Sahel Initiative (PSI), which had already gathered more attention than the similar but much larger East Africa Counter Terrorism Initiative.

• The GSPC is the only North African terrorist group that has openly declared its allegiance to al-Qaeda and the GSPC group that was targeted was the same force that had previously taken 32 European tourists hostage and only releasing them in return for more than $5,000,000 in ransom from the German government. In the months leading up to the battle in Chad, the GSPC group had lived mostly in northern Mali until they were chased east into first northern Niger and then Chad.

• The GSPC group's leader was Amari Saifi, organization's second-in-command, who escaped capture at the hands of US or local forces but was soon apprehended by the Chadian MDJT rebels. After lengthy negotiations, he was turned over to Libya and then sent back to Algeria for trial.

• During this period, the US began the PSI training program for Mauritania, Mali, Niger, and Chad, using Marine and Special Forces soldiers to train the African nations' companies in the hopes of helping them to develop better control of their territory and porous borders. The US is currently considering expanding this training to encompass Senegal, Morocco, Algeria, and Nigeria.

• While some observers have been skeptical of North Africa as a front in the war on terrorism, the battle with the GSPC in Chad appears to support US claims in this regard. The question is whether the GSPC case is an isolated incident or part of a larger trend. Each of the PSI countries suffers from a variety of threats that could easily trigger a rise in Islamism among the general population. While Niger and Mali are democratizing, with Mali having an excellent record on freedom of the press and Niger advocating separation of religion and politics as well as freedom of religion, Chad and Mauritania are very different stories. The Chadian government is dominated by one ethnic group and irredeemably corrupt, with the Darfur crisis having brought in more than 200,000 refugees. In Mauritania, an authoritarian government is turning more and more to repression in an effort to retain its hold on power.

I believe Mauritania still allows (or at least tolerates) the slave trade as well ...

• An interest has been shown in all 4 PSI countries with respect to Sudanese controlled or backed Islamist missionaries or NGOs, with Chad in particular being subject to infiltration by Sudanese Islamists traveling under forged identities. Mali is the most clearly targeted, with a broad range of groups, some politicized, others apolitical, and some armed moving into the northern part of the country in large numbers. Algeria has been the main source of the GSPC influx, but others are coming in from South Asia and the Middle East.

To that I would just add that Sudan and Saudi Arabia are the main impetus for much of the Wahhabi NGOs in North Africa in the same process we've seen in other parts of the world. There has also been some speculation that there's a bonafide al-Qaeda base that's been set up in northern Mali similar to similar bases we've seen in Waziristan, the Pankisi Gorge, and pre-OIF Iraqi Kurdistan.

• There has been an unprecedented rise in anti-American sentiments in North Africa, but much of this has little to do with Islam, let alone terrorism. In addition, all 4 PSI governments contain actors who may attempt to play to fears of Islamist threat in order to gain American support the same way they did from either the US or USSR during the Cold War.

• In Mauritania, the fragile and unpopular dictatorship of Ould Taya has adopted Islamic rhetoric to justify removing its few remaining domestic opponents and claims to be protecting the general population from al-Qaeda. Mauritania has received PSI training and other forms of Western support despite its abysmal human rights record.

• 3 of the 4 PSI nations are among the 10 poorest on the planet, with Mauritania not much better. Life expectancy in all 4 countries is not even 55 years.

West African Islam Primer

• The idea that poverty is the root cause of terrorism is pretty much refuted by the ICG research on the Sahel region. The situation in northern Mali is caused largely by the local political-economic situation, with Islamism arriving late on the scene. While Islamists in all 4 PSI countries benefit from cash pumped in from the Gulf states, so do many others without any role in violence or politics.

• While most of the GSPC members are poor, so are most of their opponents. If poor economies were the root cause of terrorism, West Africa should the center rather than the periphery given its unequalled level of poverty.

There goes another meme down the drain. I know that the average GIA member at the group's height did a lot better than the average Algerian, what with all the slaves and loot and what not.

• It is important not to make distinctions in West African Islam between the "good" (Sufism) and the "bad" (Wahhabism) varieties in the region. The reigning Maliki school of Islam and its Sufi analogues have generally been peaceful, but they have also been violent on occasion, just as some Wahhabis have been peaceful.

• The overwhelming majority of Sahel Muslims are Sunni, most belonging to the Maliki school. While many do not belong to a Sufi brotherhood, the 3 major ones are the Qadiriyyah (with the longest history in the region), the Mouridiyyah (dominant in Senegal), and the Tijaniyyah (practiced widely in all 4 PSI nations).

• Many scholars, clerics, and politicians of the region emphasize the peaceful, inclusive nature of Sahel Islam, pointing to the Sufi role in forming a regional culture of tolerance. These descriptions are usually contrasted to the behavior of the Salafist movements that impose much stricter codes of behavior over their adherence and attempts to blur the distinction between politics and religion in their calls for the imposition of sha'riah. It should be noted that many of those studying Sahel Islam generally try to emphasize its non-threatening nature towards the state, a holdover from the French colonial policy that sought to mobilize pagan populations against Muslim leaders and nations that resisted conquest. In the end, religious leaders negotiated a strict separation between religion and government similar to the French laicism. Sufis have traditionally avoided involvement in politics but exerted a strong influence on it through their moral and charismatic authority.

• Senegal is the clearest example of how Sufi brotherhoods serve as a vehicle for the population's religious life but also play an important role in civil society. Religious structures and ideology have facilitated a system of social organization outside the state that serves to counter-balance it when it steps outside its limits.

This strikes me as being more or less akin to the role the Catholic Church played during its more benign period in European history.

• While Sufism can be a stabilizing force in Sahel, it is important to recognize that the Sufi brotherhoods are not frozen in time. It is also important to recognize that the Sahel region also has a well-developed tradition of pre-colonial states who have spread their religion by force into neighboring regions. One example is El Haji Umar Tal, who spread the Tijaniyyah brotherhood across the Sahel and created an empire that covered large parts of present-day Guinea, Senegal, and Mali. A charismatic mystic, Tal made the Hajj from 1828-1830, visiting the Islamic theocracies in what is today and Mali and Nigeria along the way. When he returned to the Sahel, Tal launched a jihad from 1851-1864.

The difference is, and I think this is key, is that Tal's religious war wasn't all that unique for his period and no Sufi, Tijaniyyah or otherwise, wants to replicate his experiment. Many Salafists, by contrast, explicitly desire to reestablish an Islamic empire spanning from Morocco to Indonesia, which is the reason that we're worried about them to begin with.

• The fighting in that spanned the Sahel region during the 1800s led to religion becoming as much a basis for political struggle and national legitimacy as nobility had been. Those who could demonstrate their form of Islam were superior gained legitimacy, even though the contest was far more military than theological in nature.

• Salafists identify the problems of the contemporary world with the diversion from the correct path from their interpretation of the Qur'an. They describe their actions as a struggle against innovations and blasphemy, which they see have been introduced to the Sufi brotherhoods through their belief in the cult of the saints, use of protective amulets, and the role of the Marabout (a Sufi master who serves as a teacher, translator, and intermediary between God and his frequently illiterate students) as an intermediary between God and man.

• There is a division between the Salafiyyah Ilmiyyah (scholarly Salafists) and the Salafiyyah Jihadiyyah (fighting Salafists) movements. Members of the latter are those who fought in Afghanistan in the 1980s and extended their activities to Bosnia, Chechnya, Kashmir, and most recently Iraq and form the core of terrorist groups across Africa, where they are usually called "Afghans."

• Most Salafists are extremely radical in their call for a return to what they view as traditional Muslim practices without being involved in politics, such as the Jamaat al-Tabligh. Nevertheless, they share worldviews with the jihadi Salafists in their belief that Islamic resurgence should encompass the organization of society, politics, economics, and personal life. They should be understood as separate from a broader category of Islamists who believe that some form of Islamic practice should be instituted by the government, in contrast to the French-influenced laicist approach.

You normally describe a group that argues for a dramatic reorganization of society, politics, economics, and personal life as a revolutionary movement, which is quite likely what I think that Salafism would be classified as if they claimed Marx as their source of inspiration rather than Mohammed.

I also have serious problems with the fact that "Islamism" is more a dartboard to describe anyone who falls under the category of political Islam than it is a definition, which is one of the reasons that I think that everybody from bin Laden to Hizb ut-Tahrir to the Turkish AKP to Iraqi PM Ibrahim Jaafari and Ayatollah Sistani gets tagged with that label depending on who you talk to. I also don't think that the whole right/left political distinction really applies that well outside of Western states ...

• Wahhabism came to West Africa in the 1930s (where it was known as Les bras croises because of how they prayed) through local clerics that had studied at the prestigious al-Azhar University in Egypt and their religious and anti-colonial politics were intertwined from the 1940s onwards. They sought to destroy the Qadiriyyah, Tijaniyyah, and Mouridiyyah Sufis, considering their saints, marabouts, and esoteric rights heretical in a manner eerily similar to the more militant aspects of the Protestant Reformation.

• The Wahhabi arrival in West Africa took place at the same point at which the Francophone Muslims of the region were debating decolonization. The Subbanu, the educational wing of the Wahhabi movement, was based in Bamako and inspired by the Egyptian group Jamiyat al-Shubban al-Muslimin, which West Africans had already encountered during their studies in Egypt.

• In 1949 the Subbanu set up their madrassa in Bamako, which was only briefly approved by the French authorities and shut down soon afterwards. The attempt to suppress the movement, however, only caused the Subbanu to disperse to family compounds in other parts of Bamako as well as to Bouake in the Ivory Coast and Kankan in Guinea, the latter being the historic center of Islamic scholarship in the region.

• The Subbanu held to number of views the French regarded as subversive, such as their labeling the Sufi marabouts as French puppets and railing against them as nothing more than promoters of ignorance, superstition who promoted the norms and used their charlatan skills as mystics, soothsayers, and charm-makers to separate the masses from their money. They argued against the clerical as well as the colonial hierarchy and the Wahhabi egalitarianism was extremely attractive to the traditional lower classes of West Africa as well as to those from more rigid societies that ranked hierarchy in terms of race or nobility. Since the beginning of colonialism, many of these lower-class groups had access to Western education, professions, civil services, and businesses that led them to become economically and politically powerful. Wahhabi converts frequently refer to themselves as slaves, in the sense that all men are slaves of God. As a result, they abolished class distinctions and encouraged marriages between high and low birth, even to the point of encouraging intermarriage between the peasant and noble classes.

• The GSPC, a GIA splinter group, has operated in all 4 PSI countries and is now based in southern Algeria and northern Mali. After the GIA initiated a series of mass killings [These "mass killings" encompassed tens of thousands of Algerian civilians - D] in 1996-1997, the GSPC broke away from its parent group in September 1998 under Hassan Hattab.

• The GSPC leadership has pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda, though it is not clear as to the significance of such statements. Emad Abdelwahid Ahmed Alwan, a Yemeni involved in the attack on the U.S.S. Cole, was plotting with the GSPC to destroy the US embassy in Bamako, which points to more direct connections between the two groups.

I believe Alwan was also one of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's lieutenants and the Algerian GSPC's (the European branch of the group is different) main contact with the global network.

• The Jamaat al-Tabligh (Foi et Pratique in France, Dawa al-Tabligh in the Sahel) was founded by Mohammed Ilyas in Mewat province, India in 1926 and has been compared to the Jehovah's Witnesses because of its method of preaching door-to-door. Active in over 100 countries, Jamaat al-Tabligh is the largest Muslim missionary organization in the world with more than 3,000,000 members.

• Ilyas stressed the strengthening of the Muslim faith as a means to uphold one's dignity within the context of colonial India, which is one of the reasons for the movement's success in Europe. The Tablighis are active in all 4 PSI nations, though only slightly in Niger and Chad. It is most active in Mali and Mauritania, coming into the former country from France according to the Malian clergy. From its main French mosque of al-Rahma in Saint-Denis, the Tablighis have built complexes called markazs (centers).

• Tablighis hold to 6 points of doctrine and their success in countries that are already more than 90% Muslim cannot simply be attributed to resentment or alienation and is likely due to the communal sense found within the group. Because the Tablighis do not share the Wahhabi or Salafist animus against Sufis, they have found a more receptive audience in the Sahel region.

• Tablighis have not been identified as having broken the law or engaged in or encouraging any political activity in the PSI nations, but the worry emerges among intelligence services concerning how many Tablighi converts have moved very, very fast from the Islamic revivalism practiced by the Tablighis to involvement in al-Qaeda, with examples being Richard Reid, Jose Padilla, the Lackawanna Six, and John Walker Lindh.

• The Tablighis are also accused of engaging in cult-like brainwashing at their retreats and of specifically targeting those individuals they believe to be the easiest to convert, such as those regions with little traditional Islamic scholarship that might resist the group or with a high unemployment rate. In Mali, the group has focused almost entirely on Tuareg men, particularly the former leadership of the Tuareg rebellion. The large number of Pakistani, Emirati, Kuwaiti, Omani, and Egyptian Tablighis entering Mali and Niger under false identities has also raised concerns that terrorists may be using the organization as a cover to enter the Sahel, though this remains heavily debated and largely circumstantial.

• Tablighis do have a special link to the Pakistani state and to both the Pakistani army and the ISI. They are theologically identical to the Deobandis who run the Peshawar madrassas and whose teachings underly the philosophy of the Taliban in Afghanistan, but Tablighis tend to eschew politics while the Deobandis embrace it. Neither group had much influence inside Pakistan until General Zia ul-Haq's 1977 coup, at which point the Deobandi school of Islam became the semi-official Islam of Pakistan. This has caused concerns because of the large number of Pakistanis appearing in northern Mali over the last several years.

• In the Sahel, Tablighis regard Wahhabis as Westernized because of their political participation, while Wahhabis accuse Tablighis of the collusion with imperialism because of their opposition to violence and political involvement.

• A charismatic movement that has grown up in Mali in recent years is the pieds nus (movement) that has great appeal among the youth. Founded by a Malian high school student, they refuse shoes and all traces of Western clothing or culture.

• In Senegal, General Kara has organized the unemployed into a quasi-militarized form of the Mouridiyyah brotherhood that exercises on Dakar beaches and performs marches in tight formation.

• In the last 15 years, a number of Islamic NGOs have appeared for the first time in the PSI nations, bringing with them significant funding for mosques and madrassas from Saudi Arabia. There were 106 Islamic NGOs in Mali in 2000, compared with 6 in 1991. Of these, 11 were international NGOs that also operated in Niger and Chad, among them the following: World Islamic Call Society (Libya), African Muslims Agency (Kuwait), Islamic Relief (UK), Human Appeal International (UAE), al-Mountada (UK and Saudi Arabia), World Association of Muslim Youth (WAMY, Saudi Arabia), International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO, Saudi Arabia), Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz Agency for Assistance (Saudi Arabia), and Islamic African Relief Agency (Sudan).

• Western intelligence agencies have been investigating the operation of Islamic charities since 9/11 and on March 22, 2002 a raid on the Sarajevo offices of Benevolence International Foundation led to the discovery of al-Qaeda documents listing members of the "Golden Chain," the top 20 al-Qaeda backers. On that list were 2 Muslim World League (of which IIRO is the humanitarian arm) officials and the deputy director of WAMY.

• More recently, the Islamic American Relief Agency (IARA) was closed by the US, its assets frozen, and several of its administrators arrested. The US Treasury Department has accused IARA of funnelling money to bin Laden's Maktab al-Khidamat (the proto al-Qaeda) organization during the 1980s and stated that an IARA leader was involved in attempting to help relocate bin Laden in the event his current safe haven was compromised, even to the point of sending a Sudanese al-Qaeda member to northern Mali to stay with an IARA director to see whether or not the region could serve as a possible safe harbor for bin Laden.

Quite interesting. If true, it means that bin Laden has probably sent similar scouts to other locations, probably other failed or weak states, to serve as possible havens for him. None of this leads any further clues as to where he actually is, of course, but you'd be hard-pressed to find anybody looking for him in northern Mali even with the US bounty.

• Like some Christian NGOs, Islamic NGOs tend to combine their humanitarian activities with some form of preaching, with the differences between the NGO's message in English and Arabic amounting to little more than a marketing strategy. Secular European NGOs believe it is unethical to combine humanitarian assistance with missionary work, but Islamic NGOs believe that these criticisms are directed unfairly at them rather than at their Christian equivalents. This has led to a dynamic in which Christian and Islamic NGOs compete for the hearts and minds of their clients, particularly in southern Sudan.

• Islamic NGOs tend to group Christian and secular NGOs together, argue that the latter are still working to instill values that are ultimately derived from Judeo-Christian traditions. The tension between Islamic and Western NGOs is then framed within the context of tension between the former colonialists and the African anti-colonialists. Under this worldview, Western NGOs work at the behest of governments who want to maintain political and economic control over their nation, most notably France, and promoting Western or Christian culture is seen as part of this process. While this attitude might be viewed as absurd by UN or secular NGO workers, it is nevertheless has great appeal among much of PSI nations' populations. Part of the rationale for this view among Islamic NGOs workers is motivated by the missionary impulse that accompanies their own humanitarian work in places like Chad. Also, since 9/11 a number of Islamic NGOs have experienced a great deal of loss due to being blacklisted or having assets frozen due to US claims concerning ties to al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups.

• It should be noted that even bonafide terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah do utilize a large majority of their funds for legitimate humanitarian and social services, which is one of the reasons they enjoy popular support for those who take advantage of their services. These services are likewise welcome in weak states that receive little foreign aid in the PSI nations. As a result, even if these NGOs are involved in supporting terrorist activities shutting them down also deprives those who benefit from their operation of badly-needed humanitarian services.

• The US must recognize that Islamic terrorists cannot operate long in the PSI nations without some level of passive support from the general population and that closing down NGOs that are seen as doing humanitarian work can serve as a means to create more anti-American sentiment. Mauritania's indiscriminate suppression of Islamic NGOs has only served to strengthen its domestic Islamists to the extent that the government now has very little credibility among its own public with respect to any future claims of terrorist activities.

Political Specificities

I. Mauritania

• Successive governments since independence have not been able to forge a common sense of identity beyond ethnic, racial, and tribal differences. Conflicts between "white Moors," "black Moors," and non-Moorish Africans have focused on language, land, tenure, political representation, and other issues. The highly stratified caste system in traditional Moorish society still influences the interactions between the Beydanes (white Moors) and the Haratines (black Moors) who are largely descendants of former slaves. Slavery was only abolished in 1981 may well still continue with tacit approval from the local authorities. Because of these problems, the Mauritanian government may have sought to play up the threat of international terrorism as a means of uniting its people in the face of pressing international problems.

• The political and economic marginalization of black Africans is another major issue. The first president, Mokhtar Ould Daddah, gave precedence to Arabic over French in the education system and public administration, with the objective being to make the Francophone black Africans second-class citizens. When Maaouiya Ould Sid'Ahmed Taya seized power in 1984, this marginalization of 1/3 of the population took on new dimensions when a group of black African intellectuals who published a manifesto denouncing state-sponsored discrimination were jailed in 1986. In 1987, black African army officers launched an attempted coup against Ould Taya but were captured and executed. In 1989, a border dispute between Mauritanian Moorish herdsmen and Senegalese farmers turned into pogroms in both nations in which 70,000 black Mauritanians and all Senegalese living in Mauritania were expelled.

• The periode d'exception took place in 1990-1991 in which more than 3,000 black Mauritanians were dismissed from the army and public administration, with 500 probably executed by the regime. In 1993, 2 years after Ould Taya decided to implement multi-party democracy in 1991, the government passed an amnesty law to protect those members of the Mauritanian security forces who had been involved in human rights abuses, leading to even more resentment among black Mauritanians against the government.

• Over the last decade, Ould Taya has conducted some economic reforms with a limited degree of success, but these advances have been tarnished by the spectacular level of corruption within the Mauritanian government, with between 20-25% of the government budget being siffoned off for personal use. The competition to gain access to state coffers for personal use has led to tension among the Beyadanes Moorish clans between those supported by the government and the others, with some viewing the June 8, 2003 coup attempt as a manifestation of this discontent.

The Jamestown Foundation has a pretty good piece up on the coup attempt. At the time, I had seen it as a possible sign that the GSPC might be turning its eye further southwards because it came so close to the suppression of the Mauritanian Islamists, though it now looks as though this wasn't the case.

• ICG thinks that the current threat posed to the government by Islamists is exaggerated, but the conjunction of an extremely corrupt political class with a growing Islamist movement will only serve to facilitate the latter, given what a staple denunciations of corrupt regimes are among Salafist rhetoric. The Haratines living in the poor Nouakchott suburbs are particularly responsive to the anti-traditionalist, egalitarian message of Salafism.

• Mauritanian Salafists have successfully adopted victimization at the hands of a supposedly Muslim government to their purposes. This strategy is appealing in Mauritania, even though it is the only official "Islamic republic" in the entire Sahel. Religious rhetoric has been used by governments since independence as a means of legitimization and to secure donations from the Gulf states even as the government has been keen to protect state-sanctioned "Mauritanian Islam" (as defined by the Ministry of Islamic Orientation and the High Islamic Council) from foreign influence. When multi-party democracy was announced in 1991, Ould Taya passed a law banning any political party on the basis of religion and all attempts by perceived Islamists to form legal political parties ever since have been suppressed.

• The initial Islamist suppression occurred in October 1994, following Ould Taya's shift away from supporting Saddam Hussein to embracing the US. This shift led to his establishment of diplomatic relations with Israel in 1999, causing further Islamist unrest that led to a second wave of suppression in May 2003. A law was passed following the coup attempt in June allowing only Maliki Islam to be preached in Mauritanian mosques and prohibiting any kind of political activity.

• The coup attempt on June 8, 2003 and further plots in August and September 2004 has allowed the regime to settle scores with the Islamist and secular opposition alike. 3 Islamist leaders were targeted in October 2004 by a dubiously independent judiciary, only to be released in February 2005. The release of these leaders may mark the beginning of a softening of Ould Taya's opinion.

• Mauritanian observers claim that government reports that the coup leaders were backed by Libya and Burkina Faso and trained by Muslim rebels in the Ivory Coast were all cooked up to gain US and French support, an effort that seems to have been at least somewhat successful if true.

II. Mali

• Northern Mali, as well as northern Nigeria, is regarded as the most likely locations for a terrorist base in all of North Africa by US and European intelligence even though the country is one of the most in the Sahel with a thriving democracy. Al-Qaeda operatives scouting out the country as a possible safe haven for Osama bin Laden, the upsurge in Tablighi activity in recent years, and the construction of a luxury hotel in the north by Abdul Qadeer Khan may not be related, but combined with the GSPC presence in the region they have both been enough to frighten the Malian military and worry Western intelligence analysts. The GSPC, Tablighi missionaries, and the North African smuggling networks all intersect in Kidal, the headquarters of the Tuareg rebellion that should be more properly described as dormant than dead.

• Kidal has been the seat of the Tuareg rebellion in the 1960s and the 1990s, having been controlled by the ruling Ifoghas faction during the latter period. Most of the Tuareg in this region are less intermixed with Arabs than those in Timbuktu and have been more recently converted to Islam. As there is little tradition of Islamic scholarship among them, the Tablighi are able to poselytize virtually unopposed and have done so ever since 1992 under the auspices of 400-2,000 Pakistani, Gulf Arab, Egyptian, and Chadian missionaries.

• Since 1997, the Tablighis have focused on Kidal and has successfully converted the ruling Ifoghas faction. Kidal's mayor is now Tablighi, as is the Tuareg leader Inta'la who is the real power there. Iyad, the former head of the Tuareg rebellion, is now the spiritual leader of the Malian Tablighis and spent 6 months in Pakistan in 2004 at a Tablighi retreat.

• Western and Malian intelligence agencies are convincing that the Tablighis have targeted the Ifoghas for conversion, focusing on Inta'la in particular for more than 2 years before he finally converted. The question is why, and to date there doesn't seem to be satisfactory answer, anymore than there is as to why a missionary organization is using false documents to bring Pakistani preachers into the country.

This all looks pretty damned suspicious to me as an observer. If I had to guess, I would say that it's quite possible that al-Qaeda is trying to infiltrate and subvert the Mali branch of the Tablighis to their cause (and probably other branches as well) and then use the GSPC and the Tuaregs to carve them out yet another failed state enclave that they can use to support their activities.

• AQ Khan traveled to Mali, Niger, Chad, Sudan, and Nigeria in February 1998, February 1999, and February 2000. AP reporters found that Khan had visited the Hendrina Khan Hotel (named after his wife) in Timbuktu in February 2002 with specialists from his nuclear lab.

Even more interesting, particularly when it comes to idle speculation. Bernard Henri-Levy, whom I have a great deal of respect for, has put forth the theory that Daniel Pearl was killed because he got too close to a conspiracy between the Pakistani Islamists and the ISI involving nuclear proliferation. Northern Mali would be as good a place as any if you're going to be working on al-Qaeda's secret nuclear weapons program.

• Most analysis of Khan's trips to Mali have involved speculation that he was trying to secure uranium from Niger for either Pakistan's nuclear program or that of one of his clients. However, there may be a connection between Khan and the Tablighi missionaries who started arriving in the north in 1997-1998. Timbuktu natives openly acknowledge that the Hendrina Khan Hotel was built with al-Qaeda money, pointing that it is only used by Saudis passing through Mali.

• Khan's religious sympathies do appear to be oriented in the Tablighi-Deobandi schools of Islam, the latter of which has been the official form in Pakistan for decades. While he may have financed the Tablighis to spread Islam in Central Asia and China's Sinkiang province, the evidence there is thin and he likely simply used religion to project his image as a hero of Islam.

I remember hearing that Khan was a non-practicing Sufi, though I do know that he attended the annual Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist conventions that bin Laden addressed in person or by satellite phone from Sudan or Afghanistan throughout the 1990s.

• Whatever Khan's reasons for going to Timbuktu, the fact that many of the natives considered him a Tablighi and his hotel funded by al-Qaeda is intriguing and worthy of further investigation.

Agreed. I'd like to know if the French have anything more or that, since they have the best intelligence on what goes on in their former colonies.

• The Tablighi interest in the Tuareg regions of northern Mali is complicated when one considers the GSPC presence in the region. In 2003-2004, the GSPC was active as far south as Lere near the Mauritanian border and the Paris-Dakar rally route had to be changed for fear of them. GSPC leaders married Tuareg women and met with other Algerian Salafists at water points along the desert. The rather mysterious Tablighi leader in Kidal, a young man whom no Tablighi will discuss or even name, may also be linked to the GSPC.

This would seem to support my theory that the Malian Tablighi have been infiltrated and subverted by al-Qaeda to its purposes. The intermarriage with the Tuaregs makes sense, since they're trying to get in cahoots with the local power brokers and alliances are frequently sealed by marriage in that part of the world.

• The GSPC's ability to operate in southern Algeria and northern Mali requires some degree of support and fear from the local population, but it also requires cash. This comes mainly from the hostage ransom they received from the German government as well as their ties to the local smuggling cartels. Cigarrette smuggling is the biggest traffic in the region and they are smuggled from Zerouate in Mauritania to Kidal in big trucks and containers, from which they are divided up into smaller amounts and taken to Algeria in Toyota Land Cruisers. Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a GSPC leader, is the smuggling kingpin of the region, though he is now believed to be more focused on his business interests. He has been seen frequently in Kidal since 1997, though he has not reappeared there in nearly a year and was last seen at the Algerian border with Niger in August 2004.

• While Belmokhtar is tied to al-Qaeda and a GSPC leader, he is far more preoccupied with his role as the region's preeminent smuggling chief. The GSPC members in Kidal are not smugglers, though they do tax all of Belmokhtar's traffic that comes from Mali into Algeria. Other illegal activities that Belmokhtar is engaged in include people and gas smuggling, both of which are aided by the fact that Mali maintains no border posts with Algeria or military presence in the north under the agreement that ended the Tuareg rebellion.

• Northern Mali is also awash with small arms, some used by farmers and others by former rebels. In 2003, a Malian army garrison was severely punished by the government when it was learned that most of its armory had been sold on the private market.

• The US government believes that the links between the Tablighis and the GSPC, the GSPC and al-Qaeda threaten to transform northern Mali into an Islamist stronghold that would also serve as a terrorist haven. Wahhabism has been present in northern Mali for at least 70 years, but there have been no resulting problems of violence or terrorism. The GSPC has used the German ransom money to buy good will as well as weapons from the Tuareg tribal leaders and used the prospect of wealth to recruit young Tuaregs into the organization. Anti-government resentment lingering from the 1990s rebellion also serve to make many Tuaregs receptive to the GSPC cause.

III. Niger

• Islamism in Niger is primarily an import from northern Nigeria, though this is obscured by the continuation of banditry in the northern regions of the country and claims by some Tuaregs that they will start a new rebellion. Most of the violent activity in the north in 2004 was perpetrated by associates of Rhisa Ag Boula, the former Tuareg rebel leader and later minister of tourism who is now imprisoned on charges of complicity to commit murder.

• Niger follows a modified form of the French laicism policy in which all Muslims are free to worship as they see fit so long as they do not cross a clearly defined boundary between religion and government that are seen as posing a danger to Niger or its citizens. An example of this can be seen when the imams of the Nigeria's majority Hausa cities began urging Muslim communities not to vaccinate their children because imported polio vaccines were part of a plot to sterilize Muslims and several imams in Niger's Hausa cities started making similar claims. The imams in Niger were placed in jail overnight, released, and told that they would be prosecuted if they continued to make such claims.

• President Tanja, riding a wave of popular legitimacy in the free and fair elections of December 2004, is currently in a position of relative strength and political capital, though it is likely that at some point his policies will be challenged on the grounds that they involve selling out to Western powers.

• That the government is clearly secular has not mean the nation is without problems. The north is clearly richer than the Hausa-speaking south, where the Azali (Izala) Salafists are most dominant and have banned women from doing any agricultural work and restricted them to family compounds unless accompanied by a male relative. There is also the issue of smuggling and the presence of numerous criminal networks involved in the cigarette smuggling trade, which thus far only Algeria and now Libya have started to crack down on.

• Several individuals from Maiduguri in northern Nigeria were arrested in connection with Abderrazak el-Para (Amari Saifi) and the GSPC in March 2004. A Maiduguri-based student Islamist movement known as the "Nigerian Taliban" attempted an uprising in December 2003 and captured weapons from a police station before being chased into Niger and then back into Nigeria.

• Niger's army fought the GSPC in two major battles along the Chadian border in March and at Tintiboriden along the Malian border April 2004. The June-October 2004 wave of Tuareg banditry is believed to have been linked to the arrest of former Organisation de la Resistance Armee leader Rhisa Ag Boula in December 2003 on charges of complicity to murder, with most of the violence attributed to Rhisa's brother or cousin. As in Mali, many of the problems in northern Niger stem from the fact that the Tuareg rebellion was never fully resolved and may continue.

IV. Chad

• Like the other 3 PSI states, Chad suffers from poorly-policed borders, incompetent or corrupt customs officials, and an influx of a large number of foreign nationals using false documents. This is only further compounded by the situation in Darfur and the fact that Chadian president Idris Deby comes from the Sudanese border region and is from an ethnic group close to the Zaghawa that has been targeted for extermination by the Sudanese-backed Janjaweed despite the fact that Sudan's current government supported the rise of Deby's Mouvement Patriotique du Salut (MPS) when it took power during a December 1990 coup. Shortly after taking office, Deby shut down the offices of the Sudan's People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) and enjoyed good relations with Khartoum.

• Currently, Deby and his largely Zaghawa government fears Chadian Islamists and their one-time ally General Omar Bashir, whom they fear may be trying to infiltrate into Chad. Chadian Islamists criticize Deby and MPS for being impious, corrupt, and illegitimate.

• Only 52-53% of Chadians are Muslim and they are locked in a battle for control of the country with non-Muslims (30% are Christian and 20% follow traditional African religions). Tensions have also grown over the issues of the official languages and secularism. Both are the legacy of the colonial era and have been largely embraced by the non-Muslim south, while the Arabophone north regards itself as an authentic African alternative to colonial society.

• This division also arises within civil society, with the press as well as human and women's rights organizations being made up predominantly of southerners, often receiving funds from European embassies and NGOs for their work, while northerners receive funds from Islamic NGOs supported by Islamist intellectuals, many of whom are fluent in French and can navigate easily between the Arabophone and Francophone worlds. These intellectuals regard secularism as either implicitly Judeo-Christian or atheistic and anti-religious. The latter description has some elements of truth to it, as Chadian secularism stems from the more militant varieties of laicism inspired by the French Revolution.

• The issue of laicism in Chadian society has become more sensitive over the last few years in the debates over the French "headscarf law" that bans any form of dress from schools that indicates religious affiliation. To Islamists, this is seen as proof that laicism is implicitly anti-religious and is specifically anti-Muslim. They view secularism as a vehicle through which French administrators could give primacy to Judeo-Christianity while attacking Islam in France and desire to prevent the same from harming Muslims in Africa.

• Chadian Christians have followed the headscarf debate in their country rather nervously, as they have long seen secularism as a means of erecting a firewall means of protecting them from the persecution suffered by Christians at the hands of Muslims in other parts of Africa. Chad still underwrites pilgrimages to Mecca and Medina, though not to Rome, and land bought to build a mosque is tax-free, while land bought to build a church is not.

• This controversy also comes as in relation to the family code not only in Chad but in other African countries where Muslims are a majority. Attempts to introduce a family code giving women more rights have been blocked in Chad, Mali, and Guinea. While Senegalese Muslims do live under a family code very similar to the current French version, Islamists argue that these reforms are attempts to impose a Western worldview on Islamic nations and protect their traditional social arrangements.

• Many Chadian Wahhabis reject the term [As do many other Wahhabis, what they call themselves roughly translates into English as "Unitarians."], preferring to call themselves Ansar al-Sunnah or "Defenders of the Traditions." Most are not terrorists, but rather individuals who see themselves as practicing a form of Islam that has been "purified" of African innovations to the faith.

• While the Chadian state remains secular, many Christians still resent Deby for his association with Sudan and the Union of Muslim Civil Servants played a key role in blocking the new family code, claiming that it would lead to the abolition of polygamy and the imposition of gay marriage. While neither is true, such claims lead to broad enough opposition to paralyze many government initiatives for change.

• Chadian Islamists point to government corruption, what they regard as Western attempts to destroy Muslim societies and traditions from the Cold War onwards, and the lack of employment and infrastructure in Chad is blamed on outdated colonial structures and modes of government. The corruption claim in particular has been multiplied now that oil money is entering a Citibank escrow account in London. Until Chadians see more transparency in how their government operates, the Islamist denunciation of corrupt governments is likely to resonate among many Chadian Muslims.

Overall, I think this is an extremely good report though the section on Chad strikes me as kind of rushed. There is no discussion, for example, of the reported links between al-Qaeda/GSPC and the Chadian MDJT or how the refugee influx from Darfur is likely to affect Chadian society. How do the Chadian Islamists view Darfur, for example, given that there are Muslims fighting on both sides?

All in all though, some very useful information, especially the stuff on northern Mali. There have been reports in the Spanish and Moroccan press that there is some kind of al-Qaeda hub in the Sahel and I would certainly say that northern Mali would seem to qualify.