Al-Qaeda: Regional Menace Or Global Threat?

Members of the hardline al Shabaab Islamist rebel group hold their weapons in Somalia's capital Mogadishu, January 1, 2010.

Πηγή: International Business Times
By Jacey Fortin
Jan 31 2013

With a video camera rolling straight ahead and the black flag of al-Qaeda behind him, a one-eyed jihadist and cigarette smuggler named Mokhtar Belmokhtar spelled out his vision for the future of Islamist militancy on a global scale.

It was Jan. 17, during the four-day hostage crisis at a gas plant in the deserts of eastern Algeria, where workers of various nationalities were held hostage until national forces retook the facility. Up to 85 people died in the bloody showdown.

The video, released by the Mauritanian news outlet Sahara Media, marked a new phase in the conflict that's still raging in the northern reaches of the West African country of Mali. There, Islamist insurgents had established a haven for militants -- an unprecedented feat after years of sporadic clashes. At the request of the Malian central government, French forces swooped in with airstrikes and combat troops on Jan. 11.

Only days later, Belmokhtar and his newly formed cell seized the gas plant in Algeria in a clear indication that the insurgents’ ambitions reached far beyond Mali. Belmokhtar called the Western intervention a “crusade” and commended his own forces for their success.

“We did it for al-Qaeda,” he said in the video.

For many militants in North and West Africa, the language of jihad has global undertones. And Western powers are taking notice; the United Kingdom has sent hundreds of non-combat troops to Mali, and the United States has stepped up its logistical support for the intervention.

The resurgence of al-Qaeda in Africa has raised concerns about the international threat these militants pose. In the past decade, the global al-Qaeda organization has been weakened significantly. But new conflicts involving Western forces could influence the movement in more subtle ways, strengthening its power to influence lone operatives in far-flung corners of the world.

Deep Roots

Organizationally, al-Qaeda has undergone a sea change over the past several years. Western offensives -- including hundreds of U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen -- have decimated the cadre of leaders who were behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on U.S. soil. When Osama bin-Laden was killed by American forces in May of 2011, his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, took over. But Zawahiri has been less effective than bin Laden in terms of galvanizing the global movement; he has little of bin-Laden’s magnetism and scant experience on the battlefield.

Although the al-Qaeda's core leadership has been weakened, its affiliates are increasingly picking up the slack. The emergence of locally rooted groups has much to do with the Arab Spring revolutions; in countries like Egypt, Libya and Yemen, regime changes have left dangerous power vacuums, upended national security apparatuses and weakened border controls.

This was particularly important in Libya. In the build-up to the overthrow of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, the regime hired mercenaries to fight on its behalf. Those warriors-for-pay -- which included hundreds of nomadic peoples from the Sahara and the Sahel -- acquired weapons and training that would have been hard to come by without Libya's funding.

Andrew MacGregor, senior editor of the Jamestown Foundation Global Terrorism Analysis Program in Washington, D.C., says the rise in militancy in 2012 was partly a result of the overflow of arms from the Libyan revolution.

“Simultaneous with the spread of arms throughout the region, you had a spread of radical Salafism [an ultraconservative branch of Sunni Islam],” he said. “Those two fed off each other, creating jihadist movements and threatening regional security. What we’ve seen lately is these movements trying to seize territory for themselves, now that they have the weaponry to do so.”

This empowered a branch of al-Qaeda that had hitherto been little more than a regional menace.

Weaving a Web

Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM, officially coalesced in 2007; its roots are Algerian, though it now includes militants from countries across North and West Africa.

It is not the only affiliate that has made gains in recent years. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, a combination of jihadist cells from Yemen and Saudi Arabia, came together in 2009. Al-Qaeda in Iraq, or AQI, coalesced shortly after the American-led invasion of that country in 2003 and now focuses its attacks on government officials and civilians.

Other jihadist organizations with links to al-Qaeda include al-Shabaab in Somalia, Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan and Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria. Still others may lack formal links, but they share al-Qaeda’s ultraconservative ideology and are sympathetic to its goals and methods.

These groups have had a major impact locally. In Mali, the enforcement of a harsh version of Shariah, or Islamic law, has led to executions, amputations and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people. In Iraq, communities of Shi’a Muslims and moderate Sunnis have been targeted by extremist militants for years. In Yemen, national troops backed by the United States are engaged in a battle with militants who are launching retaliatory attacks against civilians.

But when we zoom out to assess the global threat of al-Qaeda and related groups, the picture blurs. The very fragmentation that has weakened al-Qaeda's core leadership has also made it much harder to pin down, and the regularly shifting alliances between various groups have confounded Western efforts to isolate the problem.

According to McGregor, that may be part of the plan. “When we talk about AQIM, for instance, we’re not really talking about any kind of united movement,” he says.

“There are many groups technically operating on their own, or else splitting off and congealing again. This is partly strategic; it tends to throw off intelligence agencies and analysts who wind up making too much of these splits. Sometimes there’s something behind it, but sometimes it’s just an effective way of keeping the opposition off guard.”

Going It Alone

Though al-Qaeda is far less centralized than it once was, regional branches cannot be discounted.

“While the leadership of the al-Qaeda core is on the ropes, local events from Syria to North Africa to Yemen can still help it regain traction,” says Matthew Levitt, director of the Stein Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

“Moreover, these events have clearly empowered local al-Qaeda affiliates, making it likely that we’re already seeing the next iteration of the al-Qaeda threat, which is still transnational and targeting the West even as its roots tie in to more local conflicts.”

Those local conflicts are complicated. In Mali, for example, many aspects of the rebellion are rooted in ethnic rivalries, and disagreements abound as to the ultimate goal of the insurgency. But as long as the violent clashes retain their power to stir passions in militant communities around the world, al-Qaeda’s reach extends far beyond the blurry borders of its home bases.

For Western countries, lone wolf operatives -- individual actors who attempt to perpetrate attacks despite their distance from al-Qaeda’s core communities -- present the clearest danger. Networks of would-be militants around the world are linked by a vast online network of forums and chat rooms, and it is through these channels that al-Qaeda leaders often distribute videos to encourage their particular brand of jihad.

So while al-Qaeda may be fractured, militant aspects of its ideology can still thrive thousands of miles away.

The West got its most traumatic recent reminder of this phenomenon in last March, when Mohamed Merah, a 23-year-old Islamist of Algerian descent, killed seven people in a shooting spree in the southern French city of Toulouse.

But lone wolves do not have a reputation for professionalism and have been repeatedly foiled by Western security forces, many of which have fine-tuned their counter-terrorism tactics over the past decade and now use questionable methods of surveillance and infiltration to target suspected terrorists.

“We have to remember that the bigger attacks, like the one we saw in Algeria, have to be planned weeks or months in advance. Lone wolf attacks are another phenomenon entirely; they are by nature unpredictable,” says McGregor, adding that it makes more sense to focus on larger organizations to observe trends and tendencies.

To prevent tragedies like the Algerian gas plant crisis from striking even closer to home, it is necessary for Western powers to walk a fine line: responding to threats quickly and intelligently without resorting to the divisive fear tactics that paint a heavily skewed picture of Islam and may further al-Qaeda’s own aims.

For now, the threat al-Qaeda poses is largely regional -- but with hundreds of thousands of people displaced, persecuted or cut off from resources in these various pockets of militant activity, that doesn’t make the problem any less serious.

The Energy Industry is Not Safe in North Africa

Πηγή: Oilprice
jan 25 2013

Energy interests sector-wide should be prepared for the coming security nightmare that is the Sahel. At a time when even the juniors have become unaccountably brave in frontier regions, the hostage crisis in Algeria demonstrates just how vulnerable the industry is.

It is vulnerable both to the whims of Western military intervention and to Salafi jihadist moves to take advantage of a transnational opening that would have been unheard of with Gaddafi, Mubarak and Assad still in control in Libya, Egypt and Syria.

The hostage crisis at the BP-operated Amenas gas field in the Algerian Sahara was most interesting because it was the result of a militant leadership feud. It was a challenge from one leader to another, and that challenge will have to be met with something equally spectacular. It was also a message to the French about their unexpected intervention in Mali. More attacks on energy installations and Western personnel are likely to come elsewhere in the Sahel, and no amount of high-tech security will prevent them.

In total, we are talking about more than one million square kilometers of ungoverned desert in the Sahel and a French military intervention that will shift them away from Mali and toward other borders to refocus. French interests and citizens will be the primary (and already declared) targets, but Europeans in general will become increasingly profitable kidnapping victims.

Conflict in Mali

The Mali military staged a coup in March 2012--one month before presidential elections. They ousted President Amadou Toumani Toure on the pretext that his administration had failed to deal with the Tuareg, who have been pursuing independence for “Azawad” (Northern Mali) since the 1960s.

The coup leader was Pentagon favorite Amadou Haya Sanogo, who was trained in the US and by AFRICOM and was viewed in Washington as a strong ally in the fight against terrorism and particularly against the solidifying interests of AQIM (al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb). The coup left a security vacuum that allowed the Tuareg room to make a power play.

This came at a good time for the Tuareg, who had lost a major support base with the death of Libyan leader Muammer Gaddafi. In March, on the heels of the coup, the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA—a secular Tuareg outfit) took over some key government buildings in Gao (in Northern Mali). In April, they announced the creation of independent Azawad. But their victory was elusive and they were soon sidelined by three Islamist groups: Ansar al-Din (an Islamist Tuareg outfit), MUJAW and AQIM, both foreign terrorist groups.

French Special Forces arrived on the scene in March and the UN sanctioned military action. North African nations failed to move on this, leaving any military effort up to the French, while the US monitored the situation from neighboring borders (Burkina Faso and Mauritania).

In June, the MNLA were forced out by MUJAW (whose fighters are almost all former AQIM), and MUJAW took over Gao and imposed an extremely hardline form of Sharia law.

In January 2013, the French sent an initial 1,400 troops into Mali to launch an offensive supported by air strikes. The French were warned that the offensive would push militants into Algeria.

The French intervened when Ansar al-Din seized control of the town of Konna in the second week of January 2013. The French justification was to stop the Islamists from taking control of the rest of Mali. Konna in technically in the north of Mali, but it lies in the central buffer zone between north and south.

This was a flawed justification. Ansar al-Din is interested in taking control of the north, not the south, and its move on Konna was most likely intended only to measure the Mali Army’s response. Ansar al-Din does not have the capability or support (even with the help of the foreign terrorist groups) to take over the south of the country. Nor is that a likely agenda.

These militant Islamist Tuareg are natural enemies of the foreign terrorist groups (AQIM and MUJAW) and their temporary alliance is one only of convenience. Once Ansar al-Din secures its northern territory, it will summarily reject AQIM and MUJAW and likely turn on them.

Ansar al-Din views itself as defending its own territory. They are Tuareg. They are Malians. AQIM and MUJAB are foreigners and they have no territory to defend and will find themselves boxed in in Northern Mali, when traditionally they rely on mobility for their cause. The premature French military action will push AQIM and MUJAW militants to areas of the Sahel/Sahara outside of Mali and thus the crisis will spread.

AQIM, MUJAW and Ansar al-Din cooperated with each other to seize control of northern Mali last year, but since then cooperation has only been sporadic. The only other demonstration of cooperation was on 10 January, when the three launched a joint offensive against the Malian Army. It is important that there is the illusion of a united front—but it will not last. Not only are AQIM and MUJAW struggling with an insurgency leadership question, Ansar al-Din is Tuareg and has an entirely different agenda.

AQIM and Ansar al-Din are at odds over AQIM’s smuggling activities, and these three groups—along with a number of other groups—are also suffering from racial infighting among Black Africans and Arabs. Already, Ansar al-Din is showing signs that it may rescind plans for Sharia law in the north, which is HIGHLY unpopular among the Tuareg.

The leader of Ansar al-Din—Iyad ag Ghali--is under a great deal of pressure from his own tribe, the Ifoghas, to cut all ties with AQIM and MUJAW. This pressure has risen exponentially since the imposition of Sharia law in some areas of Northern Mali. Ghali is also be courted heavily by the secular MNLA, of which he is a former member, as well as Algerian intelligence officials and meditators from Burkina Faso.

The Algerian Hostage Crisis

On 15 January, a group of militants (about 40-strong) entered the Algerian Sahara via Libya and attacked a BP-operated gas field (Amenas) some 100 kilometers from the Libyan border, in a very remote stretch of desert. They took some 700 hostages. On 15-16 January, some 600 hostages were freed, but many of those were believed to have been freed by the militants themselves shortly before a raid by the Algerian Special Forces. On 16 January, Algerian Special Forces launched a three-day rescue operation. At least 60 hostages were killed in the helicopter, including at least 7 Western nationals. A total of 6 militants were captured alive.

This spectacular attack was not about Algeria, and only secondarily about the French intervention in Mali. It was first and foremost about making a power play to resolve a simmering leadership dispute among the Salafi jihadists over the Sahel.

No ransoms were sought, no hostages were executed, nor were the BP-operated Amenas gas facilities wantonly destroyed or sabotaged. It was an extremely high-profile publicity stunt designed to send this message: Mokhtar Belmokhtar is the unquestionable leader of the Salafi jihadist movement. He has managed to launch a surprise attack on a high-security Western gas field and take hundreds of hostages on the territory of Algeria—which is, significantly, the stomping ground of his key leadership rival. The secondary message—which was also necessary for the overall, incontrovertibly united goals of the Salafi jihadists in the Sahel—was a warning to the French over their intervention in Mali.

It is this leadership struggle that will best help us to predict where the next attack might take place, and how these parallel objectives will affect security across the Sahel and beyond—to Egypt and Syria.

The media has tended to attribute the hostage incident to AQIM, as this is something the Western public is familiar with and it suits further “war on terror” ambitions. However, the attack was not conducted by AQIM, rather by MUJAW, a relatively new creation comprised of former AQIM fighters and a mix of Black African Islamists. More specifically still, the attack was led by Belmokhtar, the historical leader of AQIM who split from the group only in October 2012 over a leadership dispute.

What concerns us most urgently is that Belmokhtar’s leadership rival, Abdelmakbel Droukdel, must rise to the challenge and respond with an equally spectacular attack that is still in line with the message to the French.

Beware—Libya, Niger and Mauritania

While most attention is presently on the security situation in Algeria, this may be misplaced. Algeria is the most secure of all the Sahel countries and its security forces have significantly greater capabilities. We would be more inclined to expect another terrorist attack outside of Algeria—for instance, in Libya, Niger, or Mauritania.

Libya will be the most affected, and that is fitting as this is where it all began. Unilateral French intervention led to a NATO-level conflict that effectively destabilized the entire Sahel and opened up windows of opportunity for Islamic militant groups—opportunities that have never existed before.

Libya remains a security nightmare, awash with roving militias, some of them understood to be “friendly”, working for, but not controlled by the government, others waiting for another opportunity to regroup, such as the chaos in Mali may provide. Those “friendly” Islamic militias also comprised the security team protecting the US consulate in Benghazi when it came under attack on 11 September 2012.

The violence in Mali has already sparked off a string of threats in Libya, with security forces claiming to have intercepted vehicle-borne explosive devices at the Benghazi airport before they could be detonated. Militant threats in retaliation for the French intervention in Mali have specifically listed hotels catering to foreigners across the country, but to a higher degree in Benghazi. Western diplomats remain a specific target. The Italian consul in Benghazi narrowly survived a drive-by shooting on 12 January.

After Libya, Niger is the most vulnerable to what will now be a spread of Salafi jihadist activity and kidnapping across the Sahel. It is most vulnerable because it is the poorest and its government lacks structure. Corruption among the security forces is extremely high, and there is evidence of individual security force collusion in kidnappings of foreigners.

This is also another likely theater for direct intervention by France because of French uranium interests here. Niger provides a significant amount of the uranium France uses in its nuclear reactors, and these uranium facilities should be on high alert.

Particularly in Niger, the kidnapping networks are dangerous and kidnappings are often conducted by third parties interested only in selling foreigners to AQIM or MUJAW—the two key terrorist groups in the region. This makes the kidnapping network immediately larger, and recruitment irrelevant. There is no ideological requirement. Locals looking to profit from this business will note the renewed momentum of the Salafi jihadist movements due to events in Mali and Algeria, and they will be seeking to take advantage of that momentum.

N. African chaos continues – from Libya to Mali to Algeria

French soldiers heading to Mali, January 2013

Πηγή: Jerusalem PostBy ARIEL BEN SOLOMON
21 Jan 2013

Analysis: West created a vacuum in Libya where weapons, tribes, militias, radicals were mixed together in disarray.

The focus of the tensions, fighting and killing that resulted from the Arab uprisings, including the ongoing civil war in Syria, has moved west to north Africa.

On Saturday, the Algerian army finished its attack on the terrorists who had led a four-day siege of a gas plant, killing the majority for a provisional count of 32. The number of hostages killed as of Sunday was put at a preliminary 23, according to Algerian officials.

The targeted workers came from many countries, as the plant came under a coordinated attack by terrorists who had also tried to blow up a pipeline.

Algerian Communication Minister Muhammad Said stated that the attackers came from various countries and included only three Algerians.

They entered from neighboring countries, according to DPA.

“We have indications that they originated from northern Mali,” a senior official was quoted as saying by The New York Times.

An Algerian al-Qaida-linked jihadist, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, who is based in Mali, has claimed responsibility through spokesmen and is blamed by Algerians for planning the attack, according to the report in the Times.

His spokesmen claim the Algerian assault was in response to France’s attack against Islamists in Mali.

Harold Rhode, a distinguished senior fellow at the Gatestone Institute and a former official at the US Department of Defense, interprets the events in that “the French are putting up a valiant fight, but in the Middle East you fight to win.”

“The bottom line is... that Middle Eastern culture sees inaction or verbal excuses as weakness, and when they see that they pounce – they hit big time.”

Rhode goes on to say that in order to understand the Muslim mentality, it helps to go back and look at the writings of Muslim theologian Ibn Hazm, who explained the Muslim concept of war in his work The Book of Morals and Conduct: “The measure of prudence and resolution is to know a friend from an enemy; the height of stupidity and weakness is not to know an enemy from a friend.”

Rhode implies that this is what is going on in the region.

“If you negotiate before victory they see this as weakness, and this is how the US is seen concerning Syria, Iran, and in North Africa. And America is what matters. And by not doing anything and saying, ‘let us reason together’ before victory – is basically saying I don’t have the will or ability to do what is necessary to win.”

Algeria has historically been tough on terrorists, and their failure to coordinate their response to the attack has irked allies. Algerian officers have trained with the US military and the governments share intelligence to fight against al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), according to a report by Eli Lake in the Daily Beast.

But the countries do not have nearly as strong a relationship as those of other countries in the region. Lake reported that Algeria has not accepted large defense aid packages like those of Morocco or Egypt, and instead gets most of its arms from Moscow.

Bruce Maddy-Weitzman, a research fellow at the Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University, says that “Algerians have been dealing with Islamic groups for more than 20 years.” The 1990s civil war left behind a “residual group of Islamic radicals,” which “at some point re-branded itself into the AQIM.”

If the attack on Algeria can be traced back to an international array of Islamist radicals based in Mali, then it is necessary to understand how northern Mali recently became taken over by Islamists, with roots going back to the war in Libya.

The conflict in Mali began in January 2012 with various groups fighting for autonomy in the north of the country.

Later in the spring of 2012, the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad declared an independent state named Azawad, which remains unrecognized by the international community.

It comprises more than half the territory of the Mali state.

The Mali government eventually called for help as the Islamists began taking over more of the country, and France decided to intervene to stop their advance. Reuters reports that Paris currently has 2,000 troops in the country, with its war planes pounding rebel positions for the past 10 days.

Belmokhtar has said that he would be ready “to negotiate with the West and the Algerian government, provided they stop their bombing of Mali’s Muslims.”

Maddy-Weitzman explains that the “Libya events brought a number of well-armed Taureg back to Mali, and some of them were Islamists, while others were Taureg nationalists.” It was the “Libyan events that triggered a swing in the balance of power” and allowed for these Islamic radicals to slip into Mali.

We are now seeing the “blow back into Algeria.” Tunis Afrique Presse reported at the end of last week that the attackers had demanded safe passage to Libya, but Algeria refused to negotiate. It is likely they wanted to go to Libya because the country remains unstable, divided into zones of influence by various tribes and other groups.

Maddy-Weitzman indicates Libya would be a good place to go “for terrorists looking to disappear, where the central authority is weak. And in addition, it is next door.”

In regard to whether the issue of ethnic and cultural divisions could be part of the picture, Maddy-Weitzman agrees that it could, saying the divisions are part of the internal power struggles, but the overall motivation is that of the Islamic radicals.

What seems to be evident is that the West created a vacuum in Libya where weapons, tribes, militias and radicals were mixed together in disarray, without a well-thought out plan on how to deal with the aftermath of the conflict.

This seems to be the broken record playing throughout the region from the Iraq invasion, to Afghanistan, and perhaps next in Syria – that the desire to “rebuild” is not stronger than the local currents, which are ultimately more important in determining events on the ground.

Algerian stance spoils U.S. strategy for region

 Freed hostages from Algeria crisis: Survivors of one of the largest hostage crises in recent memory began recounting their ordeal, which began Wednesday when Islamist militants took over a natural gas facility in Algeria.

Πηγή: Washington Post
By Craig Whitlock
Jan 19 2013

LONDON — The hostage crisis in Algeria has upended the Obama administration’s strategy for coordinating an international military campaign against al-Qaeda fighters in North Africa, leaving U.S., European and African leaders even more at odds over how to tackle the problem.

For months, U.S. officials have intensively lobbied Algeria — whose military is by far the strongest in North Africa — to help intervene in next-door Mali, where jihadists and other rebels have established a well-defended base of operations. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and other high-ranking U.S. officials made repeated visits to Algiers in the fall in a bid to persuade the oil-rich country to contribute troops to a U.N.-backed military force in Mali.

But Algeria’s unilateral decision to attack kidnappers at a natural gas plant — while shunning outside help, imposing a virtual information blackout and disregarding international pleas for caution — has dampened hopes that it might cooperate militarily in Mali, U.S. officials said. The crisis has strained ties between Algiers and Washington and increased doubts about whether Algeria can be relied upon to work regionally to dismantle al-Qaeda’s franchise in North Africa.

“The result is that the U.S. will have squandered six to eight months of diplomacy for how it wants to deal with Mali,” said Geoff D. Porter, an independent North African security analyst. “At least it will have been squandered in the sense that the Algerians will likely double down on their recalcitrance to get involved. They’ve already put themselves in a fortress-like state.”

Obama administration officials have said that a multinational military intervention is necessary to stabilize Mali but that such a campaign must be led by African countries and is unlikely to succeed without Algerian involvement. Algeria’s military is the heavyweight of the region, and its intelligence services are the most knowledgeable about the murky Islamist networks that have taken root.

Algeria is also the birthplace of al-Qaeda’s affiliate in North Africa, known as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM. Most of the group’s leaders and allies are Algerian, including the suspected ringleader of the hostage plot, a one-eyed desert bandit named Mokhtar Belmokhtar.

The group has expanded its activities beyond Algeria to Mali, Mauritania and Niger. But Algeria has been reluctant to fight AQIM outside its borders. The reasons are complex, but Algerian leaders say they are under little obligation to help other countries facing the problem — such as Mali — given that no one came to their aid in the 1990s when they fought their own grueling civil war against insurgents.

U.S. officials offer mixed reviews of Washington’s overall ties with Algiers on counter-terrorism. One senior U.S. diplomat, speaking on the condition of anonymity to talk freely about the relationship, called it “solid, not spectacular. It’s not carte blanche by any stretch of the imagination.”

As the extremist threat has become more acute in recent years, the U.S. military has repeatedly pressed Algeria for overflight permission so its long-range reconnaissance planes can reach northern Mali from U.S. bases in Europe.

Algiers has agreed at times, but it only approves flights on a case-by-case basis and often requires extensive advance notice, U.S. officials said. It withheld blanket permission unless Washington promises to share intelligence from the flights, including what they observe while over Algerian territory. U.S. officials said they are legally barred from doing so because of concerns that Algeria might misuse the intelligence to target people who are political opponents, not terrorists.

The Algerian military and security services have a history of brutality and extrajudicial killings. During the civil war in the 1990s, one faction of Algerian generals earned the nickname “the eradicators” for their insistence on eliminating enemies instead of negotiating.

“It’s closer to a police state than anything, and cooperation is on again, off again,” said Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. “They are fairly tight about it.”

At the same time, the United States has become dependent on Algerian intelligence to sort out a blurry constellation of jihadi groups, desert bandits, ethnic rebels and other groups. While some profess allegiance to al-Qaeda, most are focused on local grievances or criminal rackets.

“As is obvious to you, we are not from this region,” Army Gen. Carter F. Ham, the commander of U.S. forces in Africa, told reporters during a September visit to Algiers, his fourth stop there in 18 months. “We do not have the same understanding of the various actors in the region.”

U.S. officials estimate that AQIM has about 250 to 400 dedicated fighters in its ranks. But it often makes common cause with other militant groups, making its true strength difficult to pinpoint.

An enduring example of failed U.S. attempts to persuade Algeria to play a regional counterterrorism role can be found in Tamanrasset, a remote Algerian garrison town in the heart of the Sahara.

In 2010, at the behest of U.S. military officials, Algeria agreed to establish a regional intelligence-sharing and joint-operations center in Tamanrasset to track al-Qaeda fighters and other cross-border militants responsible for an epidemic of hostage-takings. Security forces from Mali, Niger and Mauritania were invited to participate and, it was hoped, organize joint patrols in the desert.

Three years later, however, the Tamanrasset center is still a bare-bones operation where military leaders from the four countries meet only sporadically, U.S. officials said. Algeria has also rebuffed requests to host U.S. military or intelligence officers at Tamanrasset, to the disappointment of the Pentagon and CIA.

Algeria’s precise motives remain a puzzle to U.S. officials, but some analysts said its leaders have shown they are willing to tolerate jihadists in the region as long as they confine themselves to the wastelands of the Sahara, thousands of miles away from Algiers, the capital, and the Mediterranean coast where most of the country’s population lives.

Additionally, jihadists’ migration to Mali and other countries may make them less of a problem for Algeria. “It more or less has kept the neighbors off balance and allowed Algeria to remain the regional hegemon,” said J. Peter Pham, an adviser to the U.S. military and an Africa expert at the Atlantic Council of the United States.

Algerian officials have denied such suggestions. In discussions with U.S. officials, they have blamed Mali for allowing the terrorist threat to fester, accusing its leaders of being corrupt and cutting secret deals with AQIM, according to classified diplomatic cables made public by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.

In a February 2010 meeting, frustrated U.S. officials prodded Nourredine Ayadi, the Algerian ambassador to Mali, to hasten the opening of the joint operations in Tamanrasset.

Ayadi bluntly replied that the Malians couldn’t be trusted, according to a U.S. cable summarizing the meeting. He charged that Malian officials had tipped off AQIM about a pending joint Malian-Algerian military operation and that the Malian government had refused to extradite “high-level” al-Qaeda suspects to Algiers.

“It seems likely that efforts to bring Mali and Algeria closer to fight AQIM, though necessary, will continue to be a very uphill battle,” Gillian Milovanovic, the U.S. ambassador to Mali, said in a cable to officials in Washington.

More recently, Algeria has been even more hostile to the idea of sending troops to Mali to fight alongside the French, who have sent about 1,400 troops to rescue the weak Malian central government and its tattered armed forces. France was Algeria’s colonial master, and the two sides fought a prolonged, bitter war before Algeria won independence in 1962.

Algerian officials also have resented the willingness of Mali and European countries to pay huge ransoms to Islamic militants. Although kidnappings of Americans had been rare prior to this week, several dozen Europeans and Canadians have been taken hostage in North and West Africa in recent years, generating tens of millions of dollars in revenue for insurgent groups.

“They are the best-funded al-Qaeda franchise in the world, and probably the best armed,” said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA official who is an analyst at the Brookings Institute. “This is not going to be a cakewalk.”

Feelings also remain raw in Algeria over the NATO-led military intervention in Libya. Although the campaign successfully toppled longtime ruler Moammar Gaddafi, the United States and its NATO allies did little to contain the aftershocks.

The region was destabilized by a flood of weaponry and armed Tuareg nomads who had fought for Gaddafi but escaped across Libya’s borders. Many of those mercenaries have since teamed with AQIM to take control of the northern half of Mali.

“This has just been an utter disaster. It was eminently foreseeable,” the senior U.S. diplomat said of the ripple effects from Libya. “It was the infusion of that additional manpower and weapons . . . that enabled this to happen.”

Al-Qaeda 'intensifying efforts to establish new base in Libya'

Πηγή: The Telegraph
By Con Coughlin
Dec 3 2012

The leaders of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), the North African offshoot of the mainstream organisation, are making a concerted effort to link up with Ansar al-Sharia.

The CIA believes Ansar al-Sharia was behind the September 11 attack on the US consulate in which four people died, including US Ambassador Christopher Stevens.

AQIM leaders are also attempting to establish ties with other Libyan Islamist groups in the hope of establishing an al-Qaeda fiefdom there similar to the one it has created in nearby Mali.

Intelligence officials say that leaders of the AQIM movement have been travelling regularly to the desert town of Ghat in south-western Libya, close to the border with Niger.

Their aim is to establish a foothold in Libya from which to launch attacks against Western targets, as well as gaining access to the large stockpiles of weapons – including Russian-made anti-aircraft missiles – that were looted by Libyan rebels during the fall of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's regime at the end of last year.

"Al-Qaeda regards post-Gaddafi Libya as a wonderful opportunity to expand its terrorist franchise," said a senior intelligence official. "The organisation will become a lot more powerful if it can form an alliance with Libyan Islamist groups."

There is particular concern that al-Qaeda could use anti-aircraft missiles such as the Russian-made SA-24 and SA-7 to shoot down civilian aircraft and attack shipping in the Mediterranean.

Reports that al-Qaeda is attempting to establish a new base in Libya follows recent claims that the organisation's network in East Africa is regrouping and rearming in northern Somalia following its recent expulsion from the Somali capital, Mogadishu.

There are around 1,700 armed groups currently operating in Libya, and many of them profess strong Islamist credentials.

The Libyan authorities recently launched an operation to remove Islamist groups from the eastern city of Benghazi in the wake of the attack on the US consulate, but intelligence officials fear Islamist terrorist groups have simply moved the operations to other ungoverned areas of the country.

Apart from Ansar al-Sharia, AQIM is trying to forge alliances with Libyan Islamist groups such as the Abu Salim Martyr's Brigade, named after the notorious Abu Salim prison where many Islamist militants died during Gaddafi's dictatorship.

The organisation, which was formed by a group of former prison inmates, has recently taken control of the Libyan town of Darna, about 150 miles to the east of Benghazi, and is actively seeking to link up with other Islamist groups in the Arab world, particularly in Syria.

Intelligence officials say that large numbers of Libyan fighters, some of whom previously fought against coalition forces in Iraq following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, have made their way to Syria to support opposition efforts to overthrow the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

Intelligence officials say the only obstacle to AQIM's successful link-up with Libyan Islamist groups concerns allegations of corruption that have been made against Abdulhamid Abou-Zeid, the Algerian-born leader of an AQIM terror cell, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia by an Algerian court earlier this year for his role in creating AQIM.

While Abu Zeid denies the allegations, other members of the AQIM leadership have accused him of embezzling funds, and are urging him to relocate to central Africa so that they can concentrate on extending their influence in Libya.

US expanding secret spy bases in Africa: report

Πηγή: Deccan Herald
June 14 2012

The US is expanding a secret network of air bases across Africa in order to spy on Al-Qaeda and other militant groups.

The surveillance is carried out by small, unmarked turboprop planes with hidden state-of-the-art sensors that fly thousands of miles between air bases and bush landing strips across the vast continent, the Washington Post reported.

The surveillance programme started in 2007, the paper said and underscores the massive expansion of US special forces operations in recent years and the steady militarisation of intelligence operations during the decade-long war on Al-Qaeda.

Bases in Burkina Faso and Mauritania are used to spy on Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), while bases in Uganda are used in the hunt for the Lord's Resistance Army, a brutal guerrilla movement led by Joseph Kony, who is wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court.

The Post said there were plans to open another base in South Sudan to help hunt for Kony, who is wanted in connection with a series of atrocities and operates in some of the most remote and inaccessible parts of central Africa.


In East Africa, US aircraft operating out of Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya and the Seychelles archipelago spy on Somalia's Qaeda-inspired Al-Shebab militia and have reportedly launched attacks on wanted militants.


The Post said the fleet of surveillance planes is made up of single-engine Pilatus PC-12s, small passenger and cargo planes manufactured in Switzerland.
The newspaper said one of the secret bases is in a secluded hanger in Ouagadougou, capital of the predominantly Muslim country of Burkina Faso in West Africa.

Burkina Faso's Foreign Minister Djibril Bassole, in an interview with the Post, declined to answer questions about US special forces operations in his country but said he appreciates US security cooperation.

"We need to fight and protect our borders," the Post quoted him as saying. "Once they infiltrate your country, it's very, very difficult to get them out," he said, referring to Al-Qaeda.

War in Libya continues on several fronts

People with the Kingdom of Libya flags gather during a celebration to mark the Revolution of February 17 in Benghazi February 16, 2012. The people are celebrating the one-year anniversary since the revolutionary uprising against Moammar Gadhafi.

Πηγή: Canada
By DAVID PUGLIESE
Feb 20 2012

The death of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi on Oct. 20 was greeted with relief in the capital cities of NATO nations.

His demise meant the war was all but over. In Ottawa, officials in the Prime Minister's Office and the Privy Council Office went to work planning the largest military victory parade the country had seen in decades.

The Conservative government wanted a major event: a flypast of CF-18 fighter jets and other aircraft, a parade, a choir and a feting of hundreds of military personnel in the Senate chambers.

The emphasis was on portraying all those who had taken part in the Libyan mission — from cooks to clerks to pilots and aircrew — as "heroes."

The PR campaign started with a news release issued Nov. 4 by the office of Defence Minister Peter MacKay, calling on Canadians to welcome their "military heroes" back from the war's staging base in Italy.

But even before Gadhafi's death, the government carefully had crafted strategic messages to be used by military officers and politicians in public and with the media when victory came in Libya. The main one was that Canada had taken a leading role in the NATO campaign and had "punched above its weight."

MacKay was the first to use the phrase, which was soon parroted by generals and defence analysts.

Politicians in other nations also started using the term. Norway and Denmark punched above their weight in the war, U.S. officials said. British Prime Minister David Cameron declared Britain's military had also "punched above its weight."

NATO saw its victory as complete: 260 aircraft had flown more than 26,000 missions. Almost 6,000 targets, including tanks and other armoured vehicles, were destroyed. More than 200 cruise missiles were fired and 20,000 bombs dropped. Canadian CF-18s flew 946 sorties and dropped close to 700 bombs.

Libya's air force was almost entirely destroyed in the opening days of the war. More than 400 government buildings or command centres were attacked.

With all the self-congratulation about victory in Libya, few in the Canadian government or military pointed out the obvious — that the third-rate army of an African state, outfitted with aging equipment, somehow had managed to withstand the full force of some of the largest militaries in the world and to hang on for more than 200 days.

As part of their PR campaign, government ministers also focused on Lt.-Gen. Charles Bouchard, whom they dubbed the "hero" of the Libyan war. The general would receive the Meritorious Service Cross, an honour military officers say usually takes quite a while to work its way through the bureaucracy before it's approved. In this case, the award was fast-tracked.

U.S. politicians were also full of praise for Bouchard's performance.

"He was tough, he was able, he took no prisoners," U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said in lauding the general's efforts.

But not everyone was enamoured with a 'take no prisoners' approach to warfare.

There were growing questions about the number of civilian deaths caused by NATO airstrikes and the lack of answers from the alliance. Antiwar groups claimed thousands might have been killed and that the alliance had committed war crimes.

A committee of British MPs tried to determine how many civilians NATO killed, but would acknowledge in a report there was no way of knowing. They accepted, however, that coalition forces did their best to avoid such casualties and commended them for that.

Libyan government officials said such casualties were unfortunate, but in the grander scheme of things, they were inevitable. They pointed out Gadhafi's forces killed thousands of people during the civil war.

Bouchard, who approved each and every airstrike, said NATO's process was extremely rigorous and geared to substantially reduce civilian deaths.

One investigation by the New York Times found that NATO bombs killed as many as 70 civilians during the conflict, including 29 women and children. Survivors told the Times that one tactic used by NATO was to restrike targets minutes after the first attack, a practice that killed civilians rushing to aid the wounded.

NATO said it didn't have any figures about such fatalities, but critics countered that the alliance never tried to compile any.

One of the most controversial NATO attacks happened in August in the farming community of Majar. Five women and seven children were killed in the initial attack. Minutes later, NATO aircraft were back dropping bombs, killing four more. When neighbours rushed to help dig people from the rubble, another bomb hit, killing 18 more civilians.

At the time, Gadhafi's government claimed 85 died, but that was dismissed as propaganda. Libya's new government now acknowledges approximately 34 civilians were killed.

But NATO insists it had carefully planned out the airstrike and the dead were Libyan military personnel and mercenaries.

Back in Canada, there was disquiet as well, but for other reasons. Among some in uniform, the Conservative government's decision to honour the Libyan war didn't sit well.

A large number of Canadian military personnel had lost friends or acquaintances in the decade-long conflict in Afghanistan. Much blood and treasure had been spent, with 158 Canadians dead and almost 2,000 injured. More than 30,000 Canadian military personnel had served at some point in Afghanistan.

But a similar ceremony to honour Canadian troops who fought in that country, complete with a parade on Parliament Hill and a flyover, had been scuttled.

It seemed to some military personnel the Afghan war was an embarrassment to the Conservative government.

Now, all the stops were being pulled out for a war where aircrew flew their missions before returning to a comfortable room and meal at night. No Canadian troops fought in the deserts of Libya. There were no casualties. Pilots at times, faced gunfire, but most of Libya's air defences were destroyed in the opening days of the conflict. The war was, as some pilots suggested, a turkey shoot.

But Libya was different in other respects. Unlike Afghanistan, it was a military action that had a clear beginning and end and what the government considered a victory.

The celebration that had been set for Nov. 24 on Parliament Hill would be televised nationally; some 300 military personnel were brought in from four bases across the country for the event.

The four-minute flight of CF-18s and other aircraft over Parliament Hill cost taxpayers an estimated $850,000, although the Defence Department has not yet tallied the entire cost of the celebrations.

But the public appeared largely indifferent. The event attracted only a couple of dozen Libyan-Canadians who waved flags as cannons sounded a 21-gun salute.

"History shows us this: that freedom seldom flowers in undisturbed ground," Prime Minister Stephen Harper told the assembled military personnel at the time. "Our job in Libya has been done and done well."

That, however, was open to debate.

While the Canadian government celebrated Gadhafi's overthrow, the countries in the region were feeling the effects.

The Libyan strongman not only had provided aid for many African nations, but employment for their citizens. His demise set into motion a mass exodus of workers back to their original countries.

That, in turn, created a domino effect as those nations struggled to deal with hundreds of thousands of traumatized and impoverished people, according to a recently released UN report for the Security Council.

Crime and drug and human smuggling have spiked in the region and the return of more than one million people to their homelands has worsened an "already challenging, humanitarian, development and security situation," the report noted.

But Gadhafi's overthrow did breathe new life into one organization — al-Qaida.

As Gadhafi's forces retreated from NATO's relentless air attacks, theyabandoned bases and ammunition depots holding thousands of weapons, including surface-to-air missiles. In the chaos that engulfed Libya, the sites were quickly pilfered, either by rebels or black marketeers.

African nations were the first to sound the warning. In late March, just weeks into the conflict, Chad's president, Idriss Deby Itno, told journalists that al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM as it is known, had obtained missiles and small arms from abandoned Libyan stockpiles. "This is very serious," he said. "AQIM is becoming a genuine army, the best equipped in the region."

Canada was slow to recognize the problem. In April, Canadian Forces spokesman Brig.-Gen. Richard Blanchette said the military didn't have any information about missing armaments or missiles.

But a month later, Algerian intelligence also was warning that looted Libyan weapons were in the hands of AQIM.

"The region has turned into a powder keg," Mohamed Bazoum, Niger's foreign minister, later would tell delegates to an anti-terrorism conference. "Things have changed and degraded since the Libya crisis and the region is on a war path. With stolen weapons circulating, al-Qaida's total impact is growing."

In November, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, one of AQIM's leaders, confirmed to the Mauritanian news agency that the terrorist group had acquired Libyan weapons.

"We have been one of the main beneficiaries of the revolutions of the Arab world," he boasted.

And in Libya, the war was over, but the fighting went on. The country's new leaders were dealing with their own problems as rebel groups, representing various factions, started to fight each other for control of the country. In Tripoli, rival groups fought gun battles over control of the city's sports complex and airport.

"I want to assure the Libyan people that everything is under control," a Libyan senior official, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, said after one four-day battle on the outskirts of the capital.

But the militias, estimated to number between 100 and 300 groups, aren't hearing the message.

Tripoli residents have seen a different face of the rebellion than the one presented to the western media. Rebels have stopped people at gunpoint and stolen their vehicles. Other militia groups have taken over homes and buildings, evicting families and businesses. The militia from Zintan stole an elephant from Tripoli's zoo, taking the animal back to their city as a war trophy.

The militias refuse to disarm and clashes continue. It's estimated that some 125,000 Libyans have retained their weapons.

A recent report from the International Crisis Group pointed to one of the key problems: Libyans had rejected the National Transitional Council. The group that the Canadian government recognized as the legitimate representative of the Libyan people, long before Gadhafi's regime fell, actually had little real power.

Although the NTC was the face of the uprising for western politicians and the media, those from the western part of the country saw it as dominated by militia groups from the east. For their part, Islamists saw the transitional council as overly secular, too geared to western values and out of touch with ordinary Libyans, according to the report. There was also bad blood between a number of towns and cities and the NTC. Militias in Misrata complained they received little support from rebels in Benghazi and that the NTC had made them pay for weapons at the height of the civil war.

Equally troubling for countries that supported the rebels was the ongoing widespread detention of individuals and the use of torture in the new Libya.

An estimated 8,500 men, women and children are still being held in detention centres run by various militias. Navi Pillay, the United Nations High Commissioner for human rights, reported that the detainees were being tortured and that both male and female prisoners were being raped.

In January, Medecins sans Frontieres pulled its medical staff from detention facilities in Misrata after they determined more than 100 people had been tortured. The group's doctors were being asked to keep prisoners alive so they could be tortured again.

Around the same time, Amnesty International reported that up to a dozen people had been tortured to death by Libya's new National Military Security agency.

In early February, came the news that Libya's former ambassador to France, Omar Brebesh, had been killed shortly after being arrested by a militia group. According to the autopsy, he died after suffering "multiple bodily injuries and fractured ribs."

Such cases prompted Canada's Foreign Affairs Department to deliver a diplomatic note rebuking Libya for allowing such activities to take place.

But Libyan officials dismissed allegations of torture as unfounded. The head of Misrata's military council, Ibrahim Beitelmal, instead claimed that human rights organizations, such as Amnesty International and Medecins sans Frontieres were part of "Gadhafi's fifth column."

Still, Canada's Bouchard remains optimistic about Libya's future. He argues that the country is in a good position to bounce back and to become prosperous again.

"I believe once we get there, mixed with a government that is transparent and representative, we will find our way toward a Libyan democracy," he recently told a Canadian Senate meeting.

Asked by senators about the torture and the concerns raised by Medecins sans Frontieres and other agencies, Bouchard said the Libyans needed to understand that such things were not right.

"I would offer that this is an emerging democracy by people who may not know all the things that need to be done and who may not understand all the human rights issues," he added.

Some are not so sure Libya is an emerging democracy. They point to the country's warm welcome in January of Sudan's President Omar Hassan al-Bashir.

Bashir, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of genocide and war crimes, was offering Tripoli the use of his military to help create a new Libyan army.

This was the same military Bashir used to ethnically cleanse Darfur. Ironically, the International Criminal Court had sought to try Gadhafi for similar war crimes.

But Bashir felt at home in Tripoli. Asked by journalists if he was worried he might be arrested and handed over to the international court, he answered: "By God, no."

He said he felt absolutely safe in the new Libya.

N. Africa: 'Instability Spreading'

Πηγή: The American Spectator
By AYMENN JAWAD AL-TAMIMI

Sep. 19 2011

Since the de facto downfall of the Gaddafi regime, much analysis has justifiably focused on the questions of Libya's internal dynamics and future stability. However, the possible implications on the security of the wider region, extending south through the Sahel to Nigeria, have been less widely considered.

One cause for concern that should have been raised during NATO's campaign in Libya was the fact that airstrikes did not target Gaddafi's vast stockpiles of missiles and other arms. The predictable result of this massive error has been that several arms depots -- including one that contains SA-7b Grail heat-seeking missiles imported by the Gaddafi regime from former Soviet bloc countries -- have been found looted in Tripoli.

The consequences of this development are very worrying indeed. The greatest danger is that smugglers could hand over these weapons to al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which is the local affiliate branch of the jihadist group across northwest Africa and the Sahel. As Peter Bouckaert -- emergencies director of Human Rights Watch -- put it, "If these [munitions] fall into the wrong hands, they could turn all of North Africa into a no-fly zone."

AQIM initially began as an anti-government insurgency (also targeting Berber activists) in the Algerian Civil War of the 1990s under the name "Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat,"eventually swearing allegiance to al Qaeda in 2006.

AQIM has since furthered its range of operations southward into Niger, Mali, Mauritania and Senegal. The group primarily engages in suicide bombings and other attacks on outposts belonging to the Algerian security forces, and has been involved in kidnappings of foreigners elsewhere (e.g. in December 2009, an Italian couple en route to Burkina Faso were taken hostage by AQIM in Mauritania).

The outcome of the Libyan civil war will no doubt give further impetus for AQIM to step up its attacks on the Algerian government, which made the tactical error of openly backing Gaddafi against the rebel forces and could well see further unrest among the population.

A further problem is posed by the outflow of pro-Gaddafi Touareg fighters from Libya into the country's southern neighbors. The Touareg are a nomadic Muslim Berber group, whom Gaddafi supported in their insurgency campaigns against the governments of Chad, Mali and Niger. Gaddafi never disguised his hatred of Berber language and culture, but his cooperation and cordial relations with Touareg fighters were partly rooted in his later rhetoric that called for a borderless Islamic republic across the Sahara.

As Tristan McConnell points out, the Touareg have controlled traditional caravan trade routes across the Sahara, now used for arms smuggling and human trafficking. Disgruntled over the loss of support with the overthrow of Gaddafi, mercenaries within the Touareg might forge ties with AQIM, a development that would only strengthen the latter and foster greater security threats to nations like Niger.

Yet perhaps most troubling is the fact that AQIM has recently been establishing contact and financial links with an Islamist group in Nigeria known as "Boko Haram" (meaning "Western Education is Forbidden"). Some members of Boko Haram may also have received training from AQIM militants. If AQIM gets hold of weaponry from Libya, it is probable that some of those arms will be supplied to Boko Haram as well.

Boko Haram, originally founded in 2002, is a group that seeks to transform all of Nigeria into an Islamic state. Among the organization's "grievances" include the supposed unacceptability of teaching that the Earth is spherical and the "sinful" idea that rain is caused by evaporation and subsequent condensation of water. Boko Haram came to widespread attention in 2009 for its massacres against minority Christians in the north, and it poses a particular threat in a nation that has a sharp sectarian divide between a predominantly Muslim north and a primarily Christian south.

Unfortunately, the Nigerian government has effectively engaged in a policy of appeasement towards Boko Haram, which forced one university in the country's northeast to close indefinitely in July(and may be aiming to target other universities in the south),bombed police headquarters in Abuja, the capital city, in June, and was responsible for a car bomb attack on the UN headquarters in Nigeria last month, killing 23 people.

On the other hand, as disclosures from Wikileaks cables show, the Nigerian authorities have released known terror suspects -- including affiliates of Boko Haram and AQIM -- in an attempt to placate Muslim tribal elders in the north, who were supposed to act as parole officers for released detainees.

In light of these trends, consider how much further damage deeper cooperation between Boko Haram and AQIM will do to Nigeria's stability.

Unfortunately, NATO, which has been spending billions of dollars trying to prevent the return of al Qaeda to Afghanistan (even though the group is hardly likely to want to return there anyway), now appears to have significantly increased the risk of the creation of a strong hotbed of Islamist militancy in a vast region extending from Libya and Algeria down toward Nigeria.

How al-Qaeda got to rule in Tripoli

Πηγή: The Asia Times
By Pepe Escobar
Aug 30, 2011

His name is Abdelhakim Belhaj. Some in the Middle East might have, but few in the West and across the world would have heard of him.

Time to catch up. Because the story of how an al-Qaeda asset turned out to be the top Libyan military commander in still war-torn Tripoli is bound to shatter - once again - that wilderness of mirrors that is the "war on terror", as well as deeply compromising the carefully constructed propaganda of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO's) "humanitarian" intervention in Libya.

Muammar Gaddafi's fortress of Bab-al-Aziziyah was essentially invaded and conquered last week by Belhaj's men - who were at the forefront of a militia of Berbers from the mountains southwest of Tripoli. The militia is the so-called Tripoli Brigade, trained in secret for two months by US Special Forces. This turned out to be the rebels' most effective militia in six months of tribal/civil war.
Already last Tuesday, Belhaj was gloating on how the battle was won, with Gaddafi forces escaping "like rats" (note that's the same metaphor used by Gaddafi himself to designate the rebels).

Abdelhakim Belhaj, aka Abu Abdallah al-Sadek, is a Libyan jihadi. Born in May 1966, he honed his skills with the mujahideen in the 1980s anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan.

He's the founder of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and its de facto emir - with Khaled Chrif and Sami Saadi as his deputies. After the Taliban took power in Kabul in 1996, the LIFG kept two training camps in Afghanistan; one of them, 30 kilometers north of Kabul - run by Abu Yahya - was strictly for al-Qaeda-linked jihadis.

After 9/11, Belhaj moved to Pakistan and also to Iraq, where he befriended none other than ultra-nasty Abu Musab al-Zarqawi - all this before al-Qaeda in Iraq pledged its allegiance to Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri and turbo-charged its gruesome practices.

In Iraq, Libyans happened to be the largest foreign Sunni jihadi contingent, only losing to the Saudis. Moreover, Libyan jihadis have always been superstars in the top echelons of "historic" al-Qaeda - from Abu Faraj al-Libi (military commander until his arrest in 2005, now lingering as one of 16 high-value detainees in the US detention center at Guantanamo) to Abu al-Laith al-Libi (another military commander, killed in Pakistan in early 2008).

Time for an extraordinary rendition 

The LIFG had been on the US Central Intelligence Agency's radars since 9/11. In 2003, Belhaj was finally arrested in Malaysia - and then transferred, extraordinary rendition-style, to a secret Bangkok prison, and duly tortured.

In 2004, the Americans decided to send him as a gift to Libyan intelligence - until he was freed by the Gaddafi regime in March 2010, along with other 211 "terrorists", in a public relations coup advertised with great fanfare.

The orchestrator was no less than Saif Islam al-Gaddafi - the modernizing/London School of Economics face of the regime. LIFG's leaders - Belhaj and his deputies Chrif and Saadi - issued a 417-page confession dubbed "corrective studies" in which they declared the jihad against Gaddafi over (and illegal), before they were finally set free.

A fascinating account of the whole process can be seen in a report called "Combating Terrorism in Libya through Dialogue and Reintegration". [1] Note that the authors, Singapore-based terrorism "experts" who were wined and dined by the regime, express the "deepest appreciation to Saif al-Islam Gaddafi and the Gaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation for making this visit possible".

Crucially, still in 2007, then al-Qaeda's number two, Zawahiri, officially announced the merger between the LIFG and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Mahgreb (AQIM). So, for all practical purposes, since then, LIFG/AQIM have been one and the same - and Belhaj was/is its emir.

In 2007, LIFG was calling for a jihad against Gaddafi but also against the US and assorted Western "infidels".

Fast forward to last February when, a free man, Belhaj decided to go back into jihad mode and align his forces with the engineered uprising in Cyrenaica.

Every intelligence agency in the US, Europe and the Arab world knows where he's coming from. He's already made sure in Libya that himself and his militia will only settle for sharia law.

There's nothing "pro-democracy" about it - by any stretch of the imagination. And yet such an asset could not be dropped from NATO's war just because he was not very fond of "infidels".

The late July killing of rebel military commander General Abdel Fattah Younis - by the rebels themselves - seems to point to Belhaj or at least people very close to him.

It's essential to know that Younis - before he defected from the regime - had been in charge of Libya's special forces fiercely fighting the LIFG in Cyrenaica from 1990 to 1995.

The Transitional National Council (TNC), according to one of its members, Ali Tarhouni, has been spinning Younis was killed by a shady brigade known as Obaida ibn Jarrah (one of the Prophet Mohammed's companions). Yet the brigade now seems to have dissolved into thin air.

Shut up or I'll cut your head off 

Hardly by accident, all the top military rebel commanders are LIFG, from Belhaj in Tripoli to one Ismael as-Salabi in Benghazi and one Abdelhakim al-Assadi in Derna, not to mention a key asset, Ali Salabi, sitting at the core of the TNC. It was Salabi who negotiated with Saif al-Islam Gaddafi the "end" of LIFG's jihad, thus assuring the bright future of these born-again "freedom fighters".

It doesn't require a crystal ball to picture the consequences of LIFG/AQIM - having conquered military power and being among the war "winners" - not remotely interested in relinquishing control just to please NATO's whims.

Meanwhile, amid the fog of war, it's unclear whether Gaddafi is planning to trap the Tripoli brigade in urban warfare; or to force the bulk of rebel militias to enter the huge Warfallah tribal areas.

Gaddafi's wife belongs to the Warfallah, Libya's largest tribe, with up to 1 million people and 54 sub-tribes. The inside word in Brussels is that NATO expects Gaddafi to fight for months if not years; thus the Texas George W Bush-style bounty on his head and the desperate return to NATO's plan A, which was always to take him out.

Libya may now be facing the specter of a twin-headed guerrilla Hydra; Gaddafi forces against a weak TNC central government and NATO boots on the ground; and the LIFG/AQIM nebula in a jihad against NATO (if they are sidelined from power).

Gaddafi may be a dictatorial relic of the past, but you don't monopolize power for four decades for nothing, and without your intelligence services learning a thing or two.

From the beginning, Gaddafi said this was a foreign-backed/al-Qaeda operation; he was right (although he forgot to say this was above all neo-Napoleonic French President Nicolas Sarkozy's war, but that's another story).

He also said this was a prelude for a foreign occupation whose target was to privatize and take over Libya's natural resources. He may - again – turn out to be right.

The Singapore "experts" who praised the Gaddafi regime's decision to free the LIFG's jihadis qualified it as "a necessary strategy to mitigate the threat posed to Libya".

Now, LIFG/AQIM is finally poised to exercise its options as an "indigenous political force".

Ten years after 9/11, it's hard not to imagine a certain decomposed skull in the bottom of the Arabian Sea boldly grinning to kingdom come.

Note
1. Click here