Al-Qaeda's African Arm Stirs

I apologize for the whole slew of posts recently, though I hope they aren't terribly unwelcome. This issue, however, does not touch on Iraq but rather on Algeria, that much-forgotten front on the War on Terrorism. As I tried to explain last year in Al-Qaeda's African Arm, the GSPC is the main organ through which al-Qaeda operates in Algeria and they've recently stepped up their activities to include not only Algeria, but also Iraq. My summary of the International Crisis Group report in the Sahel region may also be of use, particularly the sections on Mali and Mauritania.

The first indication that things were shifting in the Sahel was the announcement of an "al-Qaeda in Algeria" group forming up under the leadership of Abu Suheib, apparently in anticipation of the upcoming Algerian amnesty offer to the GSPC. That way, if the GSPC rank and file membership does accept the Algerian amnesty offer, al-Qaeda still has a group active in Algeria to continue the fight. Until recently, the GSPC had continued to perpetrate its daily massacres of Algerian civilians, police, and soldiers with relatively little notice, but then Mauritania started raising the alarms about the group's activities.

As ICG noted in its report on 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.

• 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.

Apparently, however, all that Mauritanian smoke had at least some fire behind it as police have recently uncovered signs of al-Qaeda recruiting in the country, with the GSPC sending recruits to isolated training camps in Mali and Algeria so that these recruits could go to fight in Iraq. These claims are added a great deal of credibility by the fact that up to a quarter of the suicide bombers in Iraq are North African nationals.

Then on June 5, a force of Algerian, Mauritanian, and Malian Islamists apparently led by GSPC commander Mokhtar Belmokhtar (who has quite a resume on his own right) went after a Mauritanian military base on the border with Algeria and Mali. The government initially tried to blame the opposition Knights of Change, but later evidenced surfaced showing the GSPC was behind the attack.

The motives for attack are sketchy, but they could be part of a plan by the GSPC to branch out into a Pan-African rather than national-oriented organization or to regain clout with al-Qaeda, as suggested here:

Sources of the ministry of defence in the Mauritanian capital Nouakchott believe the attack, in which 17 soldiers were killed, was the work of Mauritanian and Mali extremists, linked to a few GSPC and smugglers operating along the borders between Algeria, Mali and Mauritania.

The discrepancies between the two terror formations are said to have beguan in April when Tunisian police arrested ten alleged terrorists who were heading to the Algerian mountains to join guerilla training camps. The ten were reportedly preparing a major attack against the capital Tunis, but Tunisian police managed to uncover the cell as a result of informants within the Algerian Salafite group.

Either way, the renewed clashes along the border could potentially signal more incursions or could set the stage for the GSPC to flee back into Mali or Algeria. Keep in mind that US-backed forces chased el-Para's GSPC fighters all the way to Chad before they gave out. Zarqawi has sent out his congradulations to the GSPC for the attack and more raids into Mauritania seem quite likely for the immediate future.