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DUBAI, Jan 28, 2011 (AFP) - Al-Qaeda has hailed Tunisia's uprising but also warned about an attempt to replace ousted president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali with another "agent" of the West, the US-monitoring group SITE said on Friday.
"Your revolution was no ordinary uprising, rather it was a devastating earthquake that struck the throne of the tyrant Ben Ali... The criminal ran away in a very humiliating scene," Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) said.
The United States "and France, with the infidel West, will not accept any real change that does not serve their interests in Tunisia. They are now busy planning to find an alternative agent who is acceptable to them," added the statement issued on jihadist forums on Thursday.
"France was the one that supported the tyrant Ben Ali until the last moment and supported him to the furthest extent, such that it even offered him its expertise in the field of oppression," AQIM charged.
The United States and France will "play the same dirty role in Tunisia in the future, unless the strikes of the mujahedeen... stop them," said the statement.
French officials frequently justified their support for Ben Ali because of what they deemed his effectiveness in fighting political Islam.
Paris had warm ties with Ben Ali's regime during his 23 years in power but made a U-turn after the authoritarian ruler bowed to popular protests and fled the country this month.
It was not until after Ben Ali was ousted that French President Nicolas Sarkozy backed the protest movement and the fugitive was denied refuge in France.
AQIM also criticised Saudi Arabia for hosting Ben Ali, SITE reported.
"He was given sanctuary... by the one who claims to be the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques," AQIM said of Saudi King Abdullah.
"If he had in his heart an ounce of passion for (Islam)... he would not have accepted to host on this pure land a criminal who was refused from all the nations."
Saudi Arabia said on Sunday it wanted to contribute to ending "bloodshed" in Tunisia by granting asylum to Ben Ali.
Riyadh has kept a blackout on Ben Ali's activities since his arrival on January 15 with six family members, after his ouster in a wave of protest in which dozens of people were killed.
by AFP
The Rest @ Zawya
Showing posts with label AQIM-Europe Connection. Show all posts
Showing posts with label AQIM-Europe Connection. Show all posts
Saturday, January 29, 2011
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Al Qaeda Trafficking Drugs to Europe from South America
This is old news to many but there are more detials to this story which are not written about in the following article. Find them here on this site.
Check out Brugges, Belgium airport.
They know tail numbers, flight schedules, and the airports used.
Shimron Issachar
************************************
Officials said U.S. intelligence first spotted AQIM's use of Boeing 727 jets for drug smuggling as early as 2006. They acknowledged that the threat was played down in the U.S. government, particularly by the Homeland Security Department.
AQIM has significantly expanded its use of jets to fly tons of cocaine and weapons to such countries as Mali and Mauritania. Officials said the weapons were used for Al Qaida's war against Algeria and Western interests while the cocaine was meant to finance insurgency operations.
"The planes have been owned by South American smugglers and terrorists, and AQIM operates flights, cargo transfer and smuggling to Europe," the official said. "AQIM could use the planes for their operations once they land in North Africa."
The Rest @ World Tribune
Check out Brugges, Belgium airport.
They know tail numbers, flight schedules, and the airports used.
Shimron Issachar
************************************
Officials said U.S. intelligence first spotted AQIM's use of Boeing 727 jets for drug smuggling as early as 2006. They acknowledged that the threat was played down in the U.S. government, particularly by the Homeland Security Department.
AQIM has significantly expanded its use of jets to fly tons of cocaine and weapons to such countries as Mali and Mauritania. Officials said the weapons were used for Al Qaida's war against Algeria and Western interests while the cocaine was meant to finance insurgency operations.
"The planes have been owned by South American smugglers and terrorists, and AQIM operates flights, cargo transfer and smuggling to Europe," the official said. "AQIM could use the planes for their operations once they land in North Africa."
The Rest @ World Tribune
Thursday, September 02, 2010
France vs AQIM
AQIM in the Sahel war heats up.
************
France has seized upon reports of the execution of a French aid worker by Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) in July to escalate its military intervention in its former colonies in the strategic Sahel region of Western Africa.
French aid worker Michel Germaneau, 78, who was kidnapped in April while working for a children’s charity in Niger, was reportedly executed by AQIM in retaliation for a joint Franco-Mauritanian raid on July 22 on an AQIM camp in northern Mali.
The raid ostensibly was an attempt to liberate him. On July 25, in a recording broadcast by the Al Jazeera TV network, AQIM said Germaneau had been killed in “revenge” for the death of its members in the raid.
Having announced the death of Germaneau on July 26, the French government declared that it would wage war in the Sahel region, an area along the south of the Sahara desert, running through Mauritania, Mali, Niger and southern Algeria.
On July 27, French Prime Minister François Fillon declared, “France is at war with Al Qaeda… Combat against terrorism, and AQIM in particular, will intensify”. He added that “roughly 400 fighters are waging a merciless struggle against the countries of the region and against our interests”.
On August 16, the government set the “Vigipirate” anti-terrorist alert system to “red” status, the second highest possible alert level.
France will increase its own military activities and its collaboration with regimes in the Sahel. Axel Poniatowski, head of a parliamentary foreign affairs commission, said, “France will provide ‘logistical support’ for military actions by Mauritania, Mali, or Niger against AQIM”.
The BBC commented, “France, as well as other European nations and the United States, have been training soldiers here for many years. This is the first time, however, they have admitted to being involved in an operation against AQIM”.
On July 26 and 27, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner visited Mauritania, Mali and Niger. Speaking in Niamey, the capital of Niger, he said, “We will be alongside our Nigerien, Malian, Mauritanian friends”. Asked about the possibility of installing bases in the region, he said, “We are not going to install bases. We have very clear defence agreements”.
In fact, reports suggest French troops already treat bases in the region as their own. The news magazine Le Point writes, “France is, with the US and UK, one of the three countries with Special Forces that can carry out completely independent operations. The units, highly trained in desert warfare, have been in the Sahel for months, train regional armed forces, know the region well, and can even if needed operate clandestinely there. They have already done it, and more than once! French units know the Sahel, and the technical means at their disposal—reconnaissance satellites, planes to intercept communications, etc.—are perfectly adapted to this theatre of operations”.
Questions on the official story
Reports from Al Jazeera and British business intelligence firm Menas question the credibility of French official statements, including on how the raid took place, its location, and even whether Germaneau was in fact executed.
There is also evidence of an aerial raid launched from Tessalit—an old French colonial base in north-eastern Mali near the Algerian border, also used by US Special Forces—in which Algeria could have been involved. French officials denied that there were aerial operations, or that Tessalit or Algerian forces were involved.
On August 8, Al Jazeera published a report by Jeremy Keenan, an expert on the region at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. He charged that “France, Mauritania and Algeria have gone to extreme lengths to cover up what actually happened”.
He noted a July 22 AFP dispatch that cited “a foreign military source in Bamako as saying that the raid on a suspected al Qaeda base (in north-west Mali) was just a smoke screen”.
He continued, “based on the reports received from well-placed regional sources shortly after midday on July 22, there had been intense air traffic around Tessalit during the night and early morning, and that Algerians, supported by French special forces, had led an assault into the adjoining Tigharghar Mountains in an attempt to rescue Germaneau”.
Keenan wrote that French President Nicolas Sarkozy was advised by his defence council at a July 19 meeting, “in which the prime minister, foreign and interior ministry, the head of the armed services, representatives of the foreign, interior and military intelligence services and [Sarkozy’s chief of staff] Claude Guéant participated”. He added, “[T]he decision to intervene in the Sahel was not taken lightly and would certainly have involved an appreciation of the views of Algeria’s DRS”, its military intelligence service.
Guéant reportedly met with DRS chief General Mohamed Mediène in Algiers on June 20.
Keenan questioned whether Germaneau was executed after the July 22 raid, or if he died before. He suffered from heart disease and had been denied access to critical medicine. Keenan writes, “[T]he last evidence that he was alive was received by the French authorities on May 14. Sources in the region believe that he may have died shortly after that time”.
He pointed out, “The only testimony of his execution has come from a local Kidal dignitary, who has been involved in previous hostage negotiations and is a thoroughly discredited source. Moreover, the very vague nature of the demands that accompanied the threat to execute Germaneau on July 26, combined with the fact that no negotiators appear to have been mobilised within Mali, as has been the pattern with previous hostage cases, must also have alerted the French authorities to question whether Germaneau was still alive”.
Geo-strategic interests and France’s “war on terror”
The declaration of a new “war on terror” is an ominous, reactionary event, whose basic social content is now well known. Intelligence services and special forces will be given free rein to use massive violence against ex-colonial regions, while the population of their home country is to be terrorised by constant warnings from the political establishment of possible attacks.
The military escalation in the Sahel under the banner of a “war on terror” is aimed at pursuing France’s strategic and commercial interests. The 2008 French white paper on defence, which outlined France’s global geo-strategy, identified the Sahel as one of four critical regions for French imperialism. The region is a key supplier of oil, minerals, and uranium.
Uranium is one critical interest for French imperialism in the region. France’s nuclear industry—which supplies 78 percent of the country’s electricity generating capacity and makes €3 billion in yearly profits from energy exports alone—relies on Niger for 25 percent of the 12,400 tonnes of uranium oxide concentrate that it consumes yearly.
The world’s third-largest uranium producer, Niger is expected to increase its yearly uranium output from 3,500 to 10,500 metric tonnes. French state-owned nuclear company Areva has exploited these uranium reserves for 40 years. It mines the Arlit and Akouta deposits, which produced over 3,000 metric tonnes in 2008. Areva has invested €1.2 billion in the Imouraren deposit, which is expected to produce almost 5,000 metric tons per year for over 35 years.
French hegemony in the region is threatened by the growing influence of China. Beijing has emerged as a rival buyer of uranium in Niger, from the Azelik and Teguidda deposits. It has also paid $5 billion for the right to prospect for oil in the Agadem oilfield in eastern Niger.
Africa Confidential writes, “China’s relatively new involvement vastly strengthens Niger’s power to bargain with France”.
France’s military intervention has the backing of Washington. Last November, US Coordinator for Counterterrorism Daniel Benjamin told the US Senate, “French ties in this region remain pivotal, and France has expressed a sincere desire to cooperate with the United States in this area of the world. The Paris meeting in September was the first senior-level meeting that mapped out a way forward for such cooperation.
Our strategic counterterrorism priorities in this region are very similar, focusing as they do on building law enforcement, military capacity, and development”.
On July 30, the Wall Street Journal commented that “Paris’s plan to increase its involvement [in the Sahel], gives reason to hope that France is ready to retake the lead in this increasingly hot front”. It added that “predictably, not of all of France’s former colonies are welcoming the erstwhile colonial master’s return to assertiveness”.
In the face of growing competition for markets and natural resources, France’s raids in the Sahel set precedent for further military escalations. French media recently indicated that the ruling class is considering fighting major wars against Turkey, Egypt, or even China. (See: “Media demands France prepare for world war”)
A French “war on terror” in Africa will be used to legitimate France’s deeply unpopular participation in the US-led “war on terror” in Afghanistan and Pakistan, to which France is deploying the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle. A recent poll found that 70 percent of the French population opposes the war in Afghanistan.
In an August 26 speech, however, Sarkozy said France would “remain engaged in Afghanistan, with its allies, as long as is necessary”.
The Rest @ World Socialist Website
************
France has seized upon reports of the execution of a French aid worker by Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) in July to escalate its military intervention in its former colonies in the strategic Sahel region of Western Africa.
French aid worker Michel Germaneau, 78, who was kidnapped in April while working for a children’s charity in Niger, was reportedly executed by AQIM in retaliation for a joint Franco-Mauritanian raid on July 22 on an AQIM camp in northern Mali.
The raid ostensibly was an attempt to liberate him. On July 25, in a recording broadcast by the Al Jazeera TV network, AQIM said Germaneau had been killed in “revenge” for the death of its members in the raid.
Having announced the death of Germaneau on July 26, the French government declared that it would wage war in the Sahel region, an area along the south of the Sahara desert, running through Mauritania, Mali, Niger and southern Algeria.
On July 27, French Prime Minister François Fillon declared, “France is at war with Al Qaeda… Combat against terrorism, and AQIM in particular, will intensify”. He added that “roughly 400 fighters are waging a merciless struggle against the countries of the region and against our interests”.
On August 16, the government set the “Vigipirate” anti-terrorist alert system to “red” status, the second highest possible alert level.
France will increase its own military activities and its collaboration with regimes in the Sahel. Axel Poniatowski, head of a parliamentary foreign affairs commission, said, “France will provide ‘logistical support’ for military actions by Mauritania, Mali, or Niger against AQIM”.
The BBC commented, “France, as well as other European nations and the United States, have been training soldiers here for many years. This is the first time, however, they have admitted to being involved in an operation against AQIM”.
On July 26 and 27, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner visited Mauritania, Mali and Niger. Speaking in Niamey, the capital of Niger, he said, “We will be alongside our Nigerien, Malian, Mauritanian friends”. Asked about the possibility of installing bases in the region, he said, “We are not going to install bases. We have very clear defence agreements”.
In fact, reports suggest French troops already treat bases in the region as their own. The news magazine Le Point writes, “France is, with the US and UK, one of the three countries with Special Forces that can carry out completely independent operations. The units, highly trained in desert warfare, have been in the Sahel for months, train regional armed forces, know the region well, and can even if needed operate clandestinely there. They have already done it, and more than once! French units know the Sahel, and the technical means at their disposal—reconnaissance satellites, planes to intercept communications, etc.—are perfectly adapted to this theatre of operations”.
Questions on the official story
Reports from Al Jazeera and British business intelligence firm Menas question the credibility of French official statements, including on how the raid took place, its location, and even whether Germaneau was in fact executed.
There is also evidence of an aerial raid launched from Tessalit—an old French colonial base in north-eastern Mali near the Algerian border, also used by US Special Forces—in which Algeria could have been involved. French officials denied that there were aerial operations, or that Tessalit or Algerian forces were involved.
On August 8, Al Jazeera published a report by Jeremy Keenan, an expert on the region at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. He charged that “France, Mauritania and Algeria have gone to extreme lengths to cover up what actually happened”.
He noted a July 22 AFP dispatch that cited “a foreign military source in Bamako as saying that the raid on a suspected al Qaeda base (in north-west Mali) was just a smoke screen”.
He continued, “based on the reports received from well-placed regional sources shortly after midday on July 22, there had been intense air traffic around Tessalit during the night and early morning, and that Algerians, supported by French special forces, had led an assault into the adjoining Tigharghar Mountains in an attempt to rescue Germaneau”.
Keenan wrote that French President Nicolas Sarkozy was advised by his defence council at a July 19 meeting, “in which the prime minister, foreign and interior ministry, the head of the armed services, representatives of the foreign, interior and military intelligence services and [Sarkozy’s chief of staff] Claude Guéant participated”. He added, “[T]he decision to intervene in the Sahel was not taken lightly and would certainly have involved an appreciation of the views of Algeria’s DRS”, its military intelligence service.
Guéant reportedly met with DRS chief General Mohamed Mediène in Algiers on June 20.
Keenan questioned whether Germaneau was executed after the July 22 raid, or if he died before. He suffered from heart disease and had been denied access to critical medicine. Keenan writes, “[T]he last evidence that he was alive was received by the French authorities on May 14. Sources in the region believe that he may have died shortly after that time”.
He pointed out, “The only testimony of his execution has come from a local Kidal dignitary, who has been involved in previous hostage negotiations and is a thoroughly discredited source. Moreover, the very vague nature of the demands that accompanied the threat to execute Germaneau on July 26, combined with the fact that no negotiators appear to have been mobilised within Mali, as has been the pattern with previous hostage cases, must also have alerted the French authorities to question whether Germaneau was still alive”.
Geo-strategic interests and France’s “war on terror”
The declaration of a new “war on terror” is an ominous, reactionary event, whose basic social content is now well known. Intelligence services and special forces will be given free rein to use massive violence against ex-colonial regions, while the population of their home country is to be terrorised by constant warnings from the political establishment of possible attacks.
The military escalation in the Sahel under the banner of a “war on terror” is aimed at pursuing France’s strategic and commercial interests. The 2008 French white paper on defence, which outlined France’s global geo-strategy, identified the Sahel as one of four critical regions for French imperialism. The region is a key supplier of oil, minerals, and uranium.
Uranium is one critical interest for French imperialism in the region. France’s nuclear industry—which supplies 78 percent of the country’s electricity generating capacity and makes €3 billion in yearly profits from energy exports alone—relies on Niger for 25 percent of the 12,400 tonnes of uranium oxide concentrate that it consumes yearly.
The world’s third-largest uranium producer, Niger is expected to increase its yearly uranium output from 3,500 to 10,500 metric tonnes. French state-owned nuclear company Areva has exploited these uranium reserves for 40 years. It mines the Arlit and Akouta deposits, which produced over 3,000 metric tonnes in 2008. Areva has invested €1.2 billion in the Imouraren deposit, which is expected to produce almost 5,000 metric tons per year for over 35 years.
French hegemony in the region is threatened by the growing influence of China. Beijing has emerged as a rival buyer of uranium in Niger, from the Azelik and Teguidda deposits. It has also paid $5 billion for the right to prospect for oil in the Agadem oilfield in eastern Niger.
Africa Confidential writes, “China’s relatively new involvement vastly strengthens Niger’s power to bargain with France”.
France’s military intervention has the backing of Washington. Last November, US Coordinator for Counterterrorism Daniel Benjamin told the US Senate, “French ties in this region remain pivotal, and France has expressed a sincere desire to cooperate with the United States in this area of the world. The Paris meeting in September was the first senior-level meeting that mapped out a way forward for such cooperation.
Our strategic counterterrorism priorities in this region are very similar, focusing as they do on building law enforcement, military capacity, and development”.
On July 30, the Wall Street Journal commented that “Paris’s plan to increase its involvement [in the Sahel], gives reason to hope that France is ready to retake the lead in this increasingly hot front”. It added that “predictably, not of all of France’s former colonies are welcoming the erstwhile colonial master’s return to assertiveness”.
In the face of growing competition for markets and natural resources, France’s raids in the Sahel set precedent for further military escalations. French media recently indicated that the ruling class is considering fighting major wars against Turkey, Egypt, or even China. (See: “Media demands France prepare for world war”)
A French “war on terror” in Africa will be used to legitimate France’s deeply unpopular participation in the US-led “war on terror” in Afghanistan and Pakistan, to which France is deploying the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle. A recent poll found that 70 percent of the French population opposes the war in Afghanistan.
In an August 26 speech, however, Sarkozy said France would “remain engaged in Afghanistan, with its allies, as long as is necessary”.
The Rest @ World Socialist Website
Monday, January 25, 2010
Sahara States to Cooperate against al Qaeda
By Salah Sarrar
TRIPOLI (Reuters) - Sahara-region states must work together to fight an emerging alliance of Islamist militants and drug traffickers with South American links, the head of a regional body said on Monday.
Western governments believe that al Qaeda-linked insurgents and drug smugglers -- using the politically volatile and sparsely populated Sahara as a safe haven -- are forging ties which could make both groups a more potent threat.
Disputes among regional governments have hampered efforts to mount a coordinated response, frustrating the United States and the European Union, which fear the region could become a launching pad for al Qaeda attacks elsewhere.
"The most important issue is the lack of security and smuggling, especially drug smuggling which has now crossed into our region from South America," Mohamed Al-Madani Al-Azhari, Secretary-General of the Community of Sahel-Saharan States, told Reuters in an interview.
"It seems that there is coordination and cooperation between smugglers and those extremists who practice terrorism and kidnap foreigners," he said after a meeting of the organisation's executive council in the Libyan capital.
"We have to face all of this frankly," said Al-Azhari, who is Libyan.
"Stability is a central issue because in the absence of stability we cannot have development."
The United States has responded to the al Qaeda threat by sending troops to take part in what it calls training and assistance programmes in some of the region's states.
But some of the bigger powers in the Sahara, led by Libya and Algeria, are resisting Western military involvement.
Al-Azhari said his organisation would coordinate efforts to "lay down a complete and comprehensive strategic plan to fight the lack of security and to not allow the foreign intervention which has begun to appear in our region".
WESTERN HOSTAGES
U.S. officials have said traffickers use the Sahara region as a staging post for flying illegal drugs from South America into Europe and that Al Qaeda militants could tap into the smugglers' network of aircraft and secret landing strips.
A group called al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) kidnapped a Frenchman and three Spaniards in the Sahara late last year. It has said it will kill the French hostage by the end of this month unless Mali frees four al Qaeda prisoners.
AQIM has waged a campaign of suicide bombings and ambushes in Algeria but in the past few years has shifted a large part of its activities south to the Sahara desert.
Last year it killed a British tourist, Edwin Dyer, after kidnapping him on the border between Niger and Mali while he was attending a festival of Tuareg culture.
The group also said it shot dead a U.S. aid worker in Mauritania's capital in June last year, and carried out a suicide bombing on the French embassy there in August that injured three people.
Senior foreign ministry officials from the Community of Sahel-Saharan States' 28-member countries met in Tripoli to coordinate their positions before a summit of the African Union to take place in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa that began on Monday.
Saharan states for more than a year have been planning a regional conference to map out a joint response to the al Qaeda threat, but the gathering has been postponed repeatedly.
Disputes among neighbouring countries -- including long-running rows between Chad and Sudan and Algeria and Morocco -- have blocked efforts to hammer out a joint approach.
(Writing by Christian Lowe; Editing by Michael Roddy)
The Rest @ Reuters
TRIPOLI (Reuters) - Sahara-region states must work together to fight an emerging alliance of Islamist militants and drug traffickers with South American links, the head of a regional body said on Monday.
Western governments believe that al Qaeda-linked insurgents and drug smugglers -- using the politically volatile and sparsely populated Sahara as a safe haven -- are forging ties which could make both groups a more potent threat.
Disputes among regional governments have hampered efforts to mount a coordinated response, frustrating the United States and the European Union, which fear the region could become a launching pad for al Qaeda attacks elsewhere.
"The most important issue is the lack of security and smuggling, especially drug smuggling which has now crossed into our region from South America," Mohamed Al-Madani Al-Azhari, Secretary-General of the Community of Sahel-Saharan States, told Reuters in an interview.
"It seems that there is coordination and cooperation between smugglers and those extremists who practice terrorism and kidnap foreigners," he said after a meeting of the organisation's executive council in the Libyan capital.
"We have to face all of this frankly," said Al-Azhari, who is Libyan.
"Stability is a central issue because in the absence of stability we cannot have development."
The United States has responded to the al Qaeda threat by sending troops to take part in what it calls training and assistance programmes in some of the region's states.
But some of the bigger powers in the Sahara, led by Libya and Algeria, are resisting Western military involvement.
Al-Azhari said his organisation would coordinate efforts to "lay down a complete and comprehensive strategic plan to fight the lack of security and to not allow the foreign intervention which has begun to appear in our region".
WESTERN HOSTAGES
U.S. officials have said traffickers use the Sahara region as a staging post for flying illegal drugs from South America into Europe and that Al Qaeda militants could tap into the smugglers' network of aircraft and secret landing strips.
A group called al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) kidnapped a Frenchman and three Spaniards in the Sahara late last year. It has said it will kill the French hostage by the end of this month unless Mali frees four al Qaeda prisoners.
AQIM has waged a campaign of suicide bombings and ambushes in Algeria but in the past few years has shifted a large part of its activities south to the Sahara desert.
Last year it killed a British tourist, Edwin Dyer, after kidnapping him on the border between Niger and Mali while he was attending a festival of Tuareg culture.
The group also said it shot dead a U.S. aid worker in Mauritania's capital in June last year, and carried out a suicide bombing on the French embassy there in August that injured three people.
Senior foreign ministry officials from the Community of Sahel-Saharan States' 28-member countries met in Tripoli to coordinate their positions before a summit of the African Union to take place in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa that began on Monday.
Saharan states for more than a year have been planning a regional conference to map out a joint response to the al Qaeda threat, but the gathering has been postponed repeatedly.
Disputes among neighbouring countries -- including long-running rows between Chad and Sudan and Algeria and Morocco -- have blocked efforts to hammer out a joint approach.
(Writing by Christian Lowe; Editing by Michael Roddy)
The Rest @ Reuters
Monday, August 31, 2009
Six al Qaida Cell Commanders to Surrender in Algeria?
The following is from a brand new blog of unconfirmed veracity, and claims that his report came from the Middle East News Line Cairo branch, but I cannot trace it back to its source, however, we will be reading their output overtime
- Shimron Issachar
Algeria Expects Imminent Surrender Of AQIM Agents
CAIRO [MENL] -- Algeria has been preparing for the imminent surrender of six senior Al Qaida operatives.
Security sources said six cell commanders of the Al Qaida Organization in the Islamic Maghreb were conducting negotiations for their surrender to Algerian authorities. The sources said the two sides were discussing the prospect of amnesty or reduction of any jail sentence for the insurgents.
The Rest @ Al Darb
possibly related from MENL- Shimron
CAIRO [MENL] -- Al Qaida has overseen a network that operates in Spain and has targeted neighboring Morocco.An indictment of suspected Al Qaida insurgents have disclosed plans by an Islamic network to conduct attacks in several cities of Morocco. Theindictment, relayed to the Court of Appeals in Sale, focused on theso-called Abu Yassin cell, aligned to the Al Qaida Organization in theIslamic Maghreb and which was said to have shuttled between Spain and Morocco.
- Shimron Issachar
Algeria Expects Imminent Surrender Of AQIM Agents
CAIRO [MENL] -- Algeria has been preparing for the imminent surrender of six senior Al Qaida operatives.
Security sources said six cell commanders of the Al Qaida Organization in the Islamic Maghreb were conducting negotiations for their surrender to Algerian authorities. The sources said the two sides were discussing the prospect of amnesty or reduction of any jail sentence for the insurgents.
The Rest @ Al Darb
possibly related from MENL- Shimron
CAIRO [MENL] -- Al Qaida has overseen a network that operates in Spain and has targeted neighboring Morocco.An indictment of suspected Al Qaida insurgents have disclosed plans by an Islamic network to conduct attacks in several cities of Morocco. Theindictment, relayed to the Court of Appeals in Sale, focused on theso-called Abu Yassin cell, aligned to the Al Qaida Organization in theIslamic Maghreb and which was said to have shuttled between Spain and Morocco.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
AQIM in Most Major Western European Nations
Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghareb (AQIM) is indeed in Belgium, France Italy and Spain as the article below suggests. I would add to the list: the the UK, Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Poland.
-Shimron Issachar
LONDON [MENL] -- The Al Qaeda network in North Africa has spread to Western Europe.
Western intelligence sources said the Al Qa1da Organization in the Islamic Maghreb has established cells in a range of European Union states.
Since 2004, the sources said, AQIM has set up 10 cells in such countries asBelgium, France, Italy and Spain."We believe AQIM is present, in some form, in every major North Africane migrant community in Europe," an intelligence source said. "AQIM eithersends agents to these communities or recruits existing community members."
The Rest @ Middle East Newsline
Monday, July 13, 2009
AQIM's Swiss Hostage Werner Greiner Release - They Paid 3 Million Euros
Word From MEMRI:
Werner Greiner, a Swiss national who had been taken captive by Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), was released July 11 after nearly six months of captivity...
-Shimron Issachar
of 07/13/2009 7:14 AM
BAMAKO - A Swiss man's six-month hostage ordeal in Mali came to an end on Sunday as he returned safely to the capital Bamako after being freed by an Al-Qaeda group that beheaded a Briton in May.
Swiss officials credited Mali President Amadou Toumani Toure with securing Werner Greiner's release and insisted Switzerland had neither negotiated nor paid a ransom for him.
He was freed in Mali's northern desert region of Gao after fierce clashes there between government soldiers and Al-Qaeda fighters, Malian officials said.Greiner, the last Western hostage held by a group calling itself Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), returned later Sunday to Bamako where he was welcomed by Swiss representatives.
"He will get a medical examination and care. Once his health permits, he will be repatriated to Switzerland to be with his family," foreign ministry spokesman Markus Boerlin told the Swiss newswire ATS in Geneva.
His health was "quite good" given the circumstances, said Boerlin. "But it is clear that he is tired, exhausted."
"The Mali president obtained the liberation. Switzerland neither negotiated with the kidnappers [Emphasis added by Shimron] nor paid any ransom," he added.
Greiner was snatched in January along with his wife Gabriella Burco, and fellow tourists Marianne Petzold of Germany and British national Edwin Dyer in Niger, near the border with Mali.
Burco and Petzold were released on April 22, along with two Canadian diplomats kidnapped in December.
But on June 3 the Al-Qaeda group announced it had beheaded Dyer because London would not release radical Muslim cleric Abu Qatada from a British prison. It was the first time AQIM had killed a Western hostage.
An AFP reporter saw a weary-looking Greiner, dressed in a brown shirt, nod and wave earlier Sunday as he got into a vehicle in a convoy guarded by Malian security forces in the town of Mopti, halfway between Gao and the capital.Earlier this month an official in northern Mali involved in the talks with the kidnappers had said Greiner was in poor shape.
"He is hardly eating at all. He is suffering a lot," he had told AFP on condition of anonymity. Another negotiator had described him as "in a critical state."Dozens of people were reported killed in Gao this month in violent clashes between the Malian army and Al-Qaeda fighters.
Following Dyer's execution Mali stepped up efforts to hunt down the Al-Qaeda militants with President Toure announcing all-out war on the group.
The army said dozens of people were killed on July 4 in the deadliest clashes yet reported in the remote northern region between government troops and Al-Qaeda fighters.AQIM claimed to have killed 28 soldiers and taken three prisoner in an ambush against an army convoy.
The Al-Qaeda group only confirmed one death from among its own ranks, that of a Mauritanian combatant. AQIM emerged from and includes members of the former Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, a radical Islamic movement in Algeria that battled the secular state.
Since 2006, it has sought to enlist extremists in Tunisia and Morocco and extended activities deep into the Sahara and beyond to the Sahel nations of west Africa, where Briton Edwin Dyer was captured and executed.
The movement seeks close ties to Osama Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda and wants to be considered its north Africa-based armed wing. An official Malian source said a ceremony to mark Greiner's liberation was scheduled at the presidency in Bamako on Monday.
The Rest @ ABS CBN News
as of 07/13/2009 7:14 AM
Werner Greiner, a Swiss national who had been taken captive by Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), was released July 11 after nearly six months of captivity...
-Shimron Issachar
of 07/13/2009 7:14 AM
BAMAKO - A Swiss man's six-month hostage ordeal in Mali came to an end on Sunday as he returned safely to the capital Bamako after being freed by an Al-Qaeda group that beheaded a Briton in May.
Swiss officials credited Mali President Amadou Toumani Toure with securing Werner Greiner's release and insisted Switzerland had neither negotiated nor paid a ransom for him.
He was freed in Mali's northern desert region of Gao after fierce clashes there between government soldiers and Al-Qaeda fighters, Malian officials said.Greiner, the last Western hostage held by a group calling itself Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), returned later Sunday to Bamako where he was welcomed by Swiss representatives.
"He will get a medical examination and care. Once his health permits, he will be repatriated to Switzerland to be with his family," foreign ministry spokesman Markus Boerlin told the Swiss newswire ATS in Geneva.
His health was "quite good" given the circumstances, said Boerlin. "But it is clear that he is tired, exhausted."
"The Mali president obtained the liberation. Switzerland neither negotiated with the kidnappers [Emphasis added by Shimron] nor paid any ransom," he added.
Greiner was snatched in January along with his wife Gabriella Burco, and fellow tourists Marianne Petzold of Germany and British national Edwin Dyer in Niger, near the border with Mali.
Burco and Petzold were released on April 22, along with two Canadian diplomats kidnapped in December.
But on June 3 the Al-Qaeda group announced it had beheaded Dyer because London would not release radical Muslim cleric Abu Qatada from a British prison. It was the first time AQIM had killed a Western hostage.
An AFP reporter saw a weary-looking Greiner, dressed in a brown shirt, nod and wave earlier Sunday as he got into a vehicle in a convoy guarded by Malian security forces in the town of Mopti, halfway between Gao and the capital.Earlier this month an official in northern Mali involved in the talks with the kidnappers had said Greiner was in poor shape.
"He is hardly eating at all. He is suffering a lot," he had told AFP on condition of anonymity. Another negotiator had described him as "in a critical state."Dozens of people were reported killed in Gao this month in violent clashes between the Malian army and Al-Qaeda fighters.
Following Dyer's execution Mali stepped up efforts to hunt down the Al-Qaeda militants with President Toure announcing all-out war on the group.
The army said dozens of people were killed on July 4 in the deadliest clashes yet reported in the remote northern region between government troops and Al-Qaeda fighters.AQIM claimed to have killed 28 soldiers and taken three prisoner in an ambush against an army convoy.
The Al-Qaeda group only confirmed one death from among its own ranks, that of a Mauritanian combatant. AQIM emerged from and includes members of the former Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, a radical Islamic movement in Algeria that battled the secular state.
Since 2006, it has sought to enlist extremists in Tunisia and Morocco and extended activities deep into the Sahara and beyond to the Sahel nations of west Africa, where Briton Edwin Dyer was captured and executed.
The movement seeks close ties to Osama Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda and wants to be considered its north Africa-based armed wing. An official Malian source said a ceremony to mark Greiner's liberation was scheduled at the presidency in Bamako on Monday.
The Rest @ ABS CBN News
as of 07/13/2009 7:14 AM
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
Abu Sayyaf Living in Germany - Possible AQIM Links in Italy as Well
Algeria: Al-Qaeda had 'contacts' with militants in Italy
Algiers, 9 June (AKI) - Algerian police have said that Al-Qaeda militants in the capital Algiers are in contact with members who live in Italy and Germany.
According to the Algerian daily el-Khabar, members of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb include young people in their 30's who are living abroad.
Algiers, 9 June (AKI) - Algerian police have said that Al-Qaeda militants in the capital Algiers are in contact with members who live in Italy and Germany.
According to the Algerian daily el-Khabar, members of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb include young people in their 30's who are living abroad.
- The Algerian daily does not specify the number of members in the group, but it mentions Nasim, also known as Abu Sayyaf, who currently lives in Germany and was recently in Algeria to make contact with AQIM leaders.
- Police said inquiries revealed a link between the AQIM cell in Algiers and some Algerian citizens recently arrested in Italy.
Last week, Italian police issued arrest warrants for five North Africans accused of plotting terror attacks in the northern cities of Milan and Bologna in early 2006.
It is not known whether the arrests were linked to the cell in Algiers.
- The five were alleged to have planned attacks against the subway system in Milan and the San Petronio cathedral in Bologna which dates back to 1390.
- Police claimed the five were part of an international group which is active in Algeria, Morocco and Syria.
The Al-Qaeda Organisation in the Islamic Maghreb evolved from the Salafite Group for Preaching and Combat, initially formed to create an Islamic state in Algeria, but is now believed to have more widespread goals.
Monday, June 01, 2009
AQIM Ambushes Army Convey in Bisraka Provence , Algeria
CAIRO [MENL] -- The Al Qaida network has resumed its offensive in Algeria.The Al Qaida Organization in the Islamic Maghreb has staged itsbloodiest attack in Algeria in 2009. On May 26, an AQIM squad ambushed an Algerian Army convoy and killed nine soldiers from a paratrooper unit. Algerian security sources said seven soldiers were also injured in theambush in the Bisrka province, 550 kilometers east of Algiers. An AQIMattacker was also killed.
The Rest @ Middle East Newsline
The Rest @ Middle East Newsline
Sunday, May 03, 2009
Fowler, Guay Release in AQIM Prisoner Swap
-Canada.com
Four imprisoned Islamist fighters were released in exchange for two Canadian diplomats and two European women, the al-Qaeda-linked terror group that held the hostages said in a statement Sunday.
The Algerian-based group also threatened to kill a British tourist it continues to hold if Britain does not release an Islamic extremist who western authorities have long suspected was Osama bin Laden's top European envoy.
It did not specify a demand for the Swiss man held with the Briton.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Canada had not been a party to any deal with the terror group, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), as he announced Wednesday that Robert Fowler and Louis Guay had been released.
But he left open the possibility that other governments involved in the region-wide efforts to free the hostages had made concessions.
Four imprisoned Islamist fighters were released in exchange for two Canadian diplomats and two European women, the al-Qaeda-linked terror group that held the hostages said in a statement Sunday.
The Algerian-based group also threatened to kill a British tourist it continues to hold if Britain does not release an Islamic extremist who western authorities have long suspected was Osama bin Laden's top European envoy.
It did not specify a demand for the Swiss man held with the Briton.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Canada had not been a party to any deal with the terror group, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), as he announced Wednesday that Robert Fowler and Louis Guay had been released.
But he left open the possibility that other governments involved in the region-wide efforts to free the hostages had made concessions.
- A prisoner exchange had been the terrorist group's primary demand for the release of the Canadians, Canwest News Service revealed several weeks after the pair's kidnapping on Dec. 14 in Niger, citing sources that could not be named.
- But the terror group says it wants Abu Qatada, who is listed by the United Nations al-Qaeda and Taliban sanctions committee as a terrorism suspect, subject to a worldwide travel ban and assets freeze, released from jail in the British Midlands, in exchange for the life of the Briton.
- the Canadians (Robert Fowler and Louis Guay),
- the German (Marianne Petzold),
- and the Swiss (Gabriella Burco Greiner),"
said AQIM, which has become increasingly active in North Africa after evolving recently from Algerian militants of the Salafist Group for Call and Combat.
"On the other hand, we declare that the organization still holds the British tourist (Edwen Dyer) and the Swiss tourist (Werner Greiner) until the achievement of our legitimate demands."
- The group gave Britain 20 days to announce it will release the "oppressed" Qatada, who is fighting a British government deportation order, but was sentenced in Jordan to life imprisonment in absentia in 2000 for his alleged involvement in a plot to bomb tourists attending millennium celebrations there.
"At the end of the period, the mujahedeen will execute the British hostage if they do not find a response to that demand after giving notice," the statement said.
The kidnappers of BBC journalist Alan Johnston in Gaza in 2007 had also demanded Qatada's release, among dozens of other captives.
The statement respectfully referred to him as "Sheik," which security experts said denoted leadership status.
He entered Britain allegedly under a false United Arab Emirates passport in 1993, but holds Jordanian citizenship because he was born in Bethlehem in 1960, when Jordan ran the West Bank.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who named Fowler as his special envoy to Niger last July, gave special thanks to Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso for their unspecified help in ensuring the release of the Canadians and European women.
But insiders say any release of AQIM operatives would also have involved talks with Algeria, which is a prime target of AQIM violence.
"They would (normally) want them turned over to Algeria," a former U.S. ambassador to the region told Canwest News Service, asking not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the deal making.
Prominent Arabic-language newspapers cite Algerian security sources as having knowledge of what it took to win freedom for the four, with one saying an unnamed European country paid five million euros -- or about $8 million -- in ransom.
By Steven Edwards, Canwest News ServiceApril 27, 2009
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Robert Fowler Kidnapped by AQIM - Does al Qaeda Care about Tuaregs?
This is new article is the first clue about who kidnapped Fowler. MNJ, take note, the kidnappers appear to NOT have been the government. I wonder if the Tuareg believe that al Qaeda really has their best interest at heart, if they captured their best peace chance for peace, (Robert Fowler) just to raise money?
- Does AQIM really care about the Tuareg cause?
- Is AQIM helping to get the government to spend money on their needs?
- When they try to get you to help kidnap a businessman selling uranium salts from the Uranium mines, will they really share what they get to help the Tuareg or to help their own cause?
BAMAKO, Mali — Malian security forces have detained an Islamist preacher on suspicion of involvement in the seizure of four European hostages claimed by al-Qaeda’s North African wing, a senior Malian security official said.
Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb said in an audio recording released last week that it was holding the four Europeans — two Swiss, one German and a Briton — seized in late January in Mali’s southeastern Gao region, near the border with Niger.
Al-Qaeda, which later published photos of the four Europeans surrounded by gunmen, said it also was holding two Canadian diplomats — Robert Fowler, UN envoy to Niger, and UN aide Robert Guay, both of whom vanished in December in Niger, Mali's eastern neighour.
- Malian security forces arrested the Islamist preacher last Thursday in the remote Anderamboucane locality on the border with Niger, on suspicion of being involved in the abduction of the European tourists, the Malian security official told Reuters at the weekend.
- The preacher was taken to the gendarmerie compound in the town of Gao, said the official, who declined to be identified given the sensitive nature of the investigation.
- The man was carrying Malian identity documents in the name of "Abdalah Ould Salah" but they were believed to be false, the official said.
Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, formerly the Islamist rebel Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) in Mali’s northern neighbour Algeria, have expanded their reach in Africa’s Sahara and Sahel regions in the past few years.
Last year the group held two Austrian tourists seized during a holiday to Tunisia for several months before handing them over to Malian authorities in the far north of the country, where a rebellion by Tuareg nomads has emerged in the past two years.
Malian officials initially blamed Tuareg rebels for abducting the four Europeans although suspicions soon turned to al-Qaeda.
Saturday, October 25, 2008
NACIRIA, Algeria — Hiding in the caves and woodlands surrounding this hill-country town, Algerian insurgents were all but washed up a few years ago.
Their nationalist battle against the Algerian military was faltering. “We didn’t have enough weapons,” recalled a former militant lieutenant, Mourad Khettab, 34. “The people didn’t want to join. And money, we didn’t have enough money.”
Then the leader of the group, a university mathematics graduate named Abdelmalek Droukdal, sent a secret message to Iraq in the fall of 2004.
The recipient was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, and the two men on opposite ends of the Arab world engaged in what one firsthand observer describes as a corporate merger.
Today, as Islamist violence wanes in some parts of the world, the Algerian militants — renamed Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb — have grown into one of the most potent Osama bin Laden affiliates, reinvigorated with fresh recruits and a zeal for Western targets.
Their gunfights with Algerian forces have evolved into suicide truck bombings of iconic sites like the United Nations offices in Algiers. They have kidnapped and killed European tourists as their reach expands throughout northern Africa.
Last month, they capped a string of attacks with an operation that evoked the horrors of Iraq:
...a pair of bombs outside a train station east of Algiers, the second one timed to hit emergency responders. A French engineer and his driver were killed by the first bomb; the second one failed to explode....
The transformation of the group from a nationalist insurgency to a force in the global jihad is a page out of Mr. bin Laden’s playbook: expanding his reach by bringing local militants under the Qaeda brand.
The Algerian group offers Al Qaeda hundreds of experienced fighters and a potential connection to militants living in Europe.
Over the past 20 months, suspects of North African origin have been arrested in Spain, France, Switzerland and Italy, although their connection to the Algerians is not always clear.
The inside story of the group, pieced together through dozens of interviews with militants and with intelligence, military and diplomatic officials, shows that the Algerians’ decision to join Al Qaeda was driven by both practical forces and the global fault line of Sept. 11, 2001.
Mr. Droukdal cited religious motivations for his group’s merger with Al Qaeda. Some militants also said that Washington’s designation of the Algerians as a terrorist organization after Sept. 11 — despite its categorization by some American government experts as a regional insurgency — had the effect of turning the group against the United States.
“If the U.S. administration sees that its war against the Muslims is legitimate, then what makes us believe that our war on its territories is not legitimate?” Mr. Droukdal said in an audiotape in response to a list of questions from The New York Times, apparently his first contact with a journalist.
“Everyone must know that we will not hesitate in targeting it whenever we can and wherever it is on this planet,” he said.
Interviews with American, European and Arab officials and a former lieutenant in Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb indicate that more opportunistic factors were at play in the growth of the group.
A long-running government offensive against the Algerian insurgents had nearly crushed the group, officials said. They needed the al Qaeda imprimatur to raise money and to shed their outlaw status in radical Muslim circles as a result of their slaughtering of civilians in the 1990s.
The Iraq war also was drawing many of the group’s best fighters, according to Mr. Khettab and a militant who trained Algerians in Iraq for Mr. Zarqawi.
Embracing the global jihad was seen as a way to keep more of these men under the Algerian group’s control and recruit new members.
Then, in March 2004, a covert American military operation led to the capture of one of the group’s top deputies. A few months later, Mr. Droukdal reached out to Mr. Zarqawi to get the man released. Mr. Zarqawi seized the opportunity to convince him that Al Qaeda could revive his operations, a former top leader of the Algerian group says.
Just as the Qaeda leadership has been able to reconstitute itself in Pakistan’s ungoverned tribal areas, Al Qaeda’s North Africa offshoot is now running small training camps for militants from Morocco, Tunisia and as far away as Nigeria, according to the State Department and Mr. Droukdal. The State Department in April categorized the tribal areas and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb as the two top hot spots in its annual report on global terrorism.
The threat is felt most acutely in Europe and in particular in France, which ruled Algeria for 132 years until 1962 and is a major trading partner with the authoritarian government in Algiers.
“We’re under a double threat now,” Bernard Squarcini, chief of France’s domestic and police intelligence service, said in an interview. “A group that had limited its terrorist activities to Algeria is now part of the global jihad movement.”
Last month, France signed military and nuclear development agreements with Algeria. Washington has also provided training to the Algerian military, and American companies have supplied equipment.
Even so, Western intelligence and diplomatic officials say the Algerian government has balked at making them full partners in investigating the group. Officials spoke only on the condition of anonymity because of security concerns.
In Europe, the authorities are eyeing the Algerian group warily, but are not convinced that the group can strike outside Africa.
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said last week that the merger of Al Qaeda with the Algeria organization and others like it brought fresh risks.
“These groups, as best we can tell, have a fair amount of independence. They get inspiration, they get sometimes guidance, probably some training, probably some money from the Al Qaeda leadership,” he said, adding that “it’s not as centralized a movement as it was, say, in 2001. But in some ways, the fact that it has spread in the way that it has, in my view, makes it perhaps more dangerous.”
Adopting Qaeda Tactics
Last Christmas Eve, five French tourists from Lyon were picnicking in midafternoon near the town of Aleg in Mauritania, some 1,700 miles southwest of Algiers. Suddenly, they were ambushed by three men in a black Mercedes. One of the gunmen turned an AK-47 on the tourists, killing four and wounding the fifth, French investigators said.
“It was total horror,” said François Tollet, 74, a retired chemist who lost his two sons, a brother and a friend in the attack. He survived when the body of one of his sons fell on him. The gunmen fled across Senegal and Gambia before they were captured in an operation directed by French intelligence in Guinea-Bissau; agents determined that the men belonged to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. (Maghreb refers to the western edge of the Arab world.)
The attack reflected what officials and militants say are the group’s tentacles in the northern tier of Africa. Camps in Mali, for example, are being used to begin operations in Algeria and Mauritania, according to French intelligence.
Mr. Droukdal described a growing network of militants only partly controlled by his far-flung deputies — the kind of autonomous jihad cells that counterterrorism officials say are particularly hard to combat. His comments to The Times included an audio file that was verified by a private voice expert who works for federal agencies. The Times also reviewed a set of 12 photographs sent by the group to verify Mr. Droukdal’s identity.
Asked about the slayings in Mauritania, he said, “The brothers implementing the process are connected with us, and we have previously trained some of them, and we offer them adequate support for the implementation of such operations.”
The epicenter of the group remains in the hills east of Algiers, where the roads are blocked by skittish police officers who finger their rifle triggers when cars approach. “Who told you to get out of the car?” a checkpoint officer yelled at one driver, backing away as the other guards swung their weapons into the faces of the passengers.
Inside police headquarters in nearby Naciria, the commander said he was so busy battling militants that he had no time to hang photographs of three officers killed in recent suicide bombings. “These terrorists don’t know any mercy,” he said. “This is Al Qaeda, what do you think?”
Even as the group expands its ambitions beyond Algeria, parts of the country remain a bleak battleground between militants and an oppressive government that follows its citizens and limits political opposition.
The Algerian government killed or captured an estimated 1,100 militants last year — nearly double the number in 2006, according to the State Department. But the group has begun using sophisticated recruitment videos to replenish its ranks with a new generation of youth that the State Department says is “more hard-line.”
The group has also benefited from a national amnesty program. Wanted posters at police stations and checkpoints include numerous men who were pardoned and released only to join the new Qaeda franchise.
American military officials estimate that the group now has 300 to 400 fighters in the mountains east of Algiers, with another 200 supporters throughout the country. Led by Mr. Droukdal, 38, an explosives expert who joined the insurgency 12 years ago, the group has shifted to tactics “successfully employed by insurgents and terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan,” according to the State Department.
In adopting these Qaeda-style tactics, it staged at least eight suicide bombings with vehicles last year, including two sets of attacks in central Algiers on the 11th of April and December, dates that now fill Algerians with dread. It dispatched the country’s first individual suicide bomber, who singled out President Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria.
The group has also stepped up its use of remote-controlled roadside bombs, and there are increasingly deadly clashes with militias armed by the government to fight the militants.
“We don’t arrest them anymore,” said Mohammad Mendri, 65, the mayor of a village who leads a militia near the coastal city of Jijel. “We just kill them.”
Its list of Western targets is growing. In December 2006, militants bombed a bus carrying workers with an affiliate of Halliburton, an American oil services company.
Other attacks killed Russian and Chinese workers. North African men trained in the group’s camps shot at the Israeli Embassy in Mauritania’s capital, Nouakchott. The group is also holding two Austrian tourists whom they kidnapped in Tunisia in February.
Its most audacious attack came last December when suicide bombers struck the United Nations and court offices in Algiers, killing 41 people and injuring 170 others. The attack drew praise from Mr. bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, who compared it to the 2003 bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad by Mr. Zarqawi.
A Merger’s Rocky Start
The on-and-off relationship between Al Qaeda and the Algerian militants began more than a decade ago. In 1994, Mr. bin Laden was looking for a new base to set up operations for his fledgling group. Algeria, with its rugged terrain and proximity to Europe, was an ideal spot.
Already, some 1,500 Algerian Islamists had returned home after helping the C.I.A. force the Soviets from Afghanistan. The men helped form a coalition of militants called the Armed Islamic Group. They took up arms in the insurgency against Algeria’s military-backed government in a conflict that has left more than 100,000 dead.
Mr. bin Laden, in Sudan at the time, asked the militants to let him move to a mountainous area they controlled, according to Mr. Khettab, the former top militant leader. J. Cofer Black, who was stationed in Khartoum for the C.I.A., said he never heard this account, but found it plausible. “We knew he was looking for some place to go,” Mr. Black said.
Mr. Khettab said the militants turned down Mr. bin Laden. “We refused, and said we don’t have anything to do with anything outside,” he said. “We are interested in just Algeria.”
The West was already deeply concerned about the rise of radical Islam in Algeria. In 1991, an Islamic political party trounced Algeria’s secular government in national polling, and the Algerian military blocked the elections.
Moderate Arab states, along with Europe and Washington, feared the installation of a fundamentalist Islamic republic on the model of Iran or Sudan and backed the government.
The crisis escalated further when violence spread to Europe. In late 1994, Armed Islamic Group gunmen hijacked an Air France jet bound for Paris intending to use it as a missile before they were killed during a stop in Marseille, according to French security officials. The following summer, three Paris bombings killed eight people and injured dozens.
Algeria’s military turned to infiltrators to help defeat the group from within, according to accounts from three high-level defectors from the Algerian Army and security service. Several massacres of villagers, for which the Islamic group was blamed, were believed to have been arranged by the military.
Even Mr. bin Laden and his backers denounced civilian killings as counterproductive to their cause, and the group withered. In 1998 a faction of militants created a new organization, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat.
The new group revived the guerrilla war against the government, with minimal singling out of civilians, according to two United States Air Force officers at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., who analyzed 10 years of its operations through early 2006. Their study concluded that the group “does not appear to be a ‘terrorist’ group as much as an internal insurgency against the government.”
The Bush administration took a different view of the group. On Sept. 23, 2001, President Bush included it on a list of organizations that “commit, threaten to commit or support terrorism.”
Shifting Strategies
The terrorist designation rankled Salafist group members, but there was dissent over whether to stay focused on the fight with the Algerian government. Two years later, the group’s leader, Nabil Sahraoui, issued a statement for the first time endorsing “Osama bin Laden’s jihad against the heretic America” and expressing his desire that the group join Al Qaeda. By this time, a United States Air Force general had the Algerian group in his sights.
“Africa had emerged strategically to the United States,” said Gen. Charles F. Wald, former deputy commander of the Pentagon’s European Command, which had responsibility for Africa.
“A significant amount of our energy is going to be coming from Africa in the future.”
The wide open spaces of the Sahara where arms, drugs and cigarette smugglers roam and tribal law reigns were also seen as potential jihadist havens. In March 2003, 32 European tourists were kidnapped there by one of the militant group’s top operatives.
“He was a very dynamic guy,” General Wald said of the kidnapper, Amari Saifi, who is known as El Para. “Could have played in a Hollywood movie. Handsome as hell. They’d take pictures of themselves out there posing.”
Expansion to Europe
Last December, French officials arrested eight men from Paris suburbs and seized:
The Spanish police said they made a similar discovery in June when they arrested eight Algerian-born men on suspicion of providing financial and logistical support to the Algerian group.
European investigators are examining a group of Tunisians with alleged ties to the North African Qaeda operation who are suspected of running a fund-raising and recruitment cell stretching from Paris to Milan.
So far, despite its stated intentions to strike Europe and the rest of the West, investigators say they see little evidence that the North Africa branch of Al Qaeda is exporting fighters and equipment for an attack in Europe.
“Their ambition is to attack in Europe, but I wouldn’t hard-sell it,” said Gilles de Kerchove, the head of counterterrorism for the European Union. “I wouldn’t say AQIM is poised to attack in Europe.”
Although the Algerian government has been a ready trading partner with the West, it has been a reluctant ally in the West’s effort against the Qaeda group. Algerian officials have declined to share key information on the United Nations bombing and have also refused to release the names of insurgents it freed from prison, according to American diplomatic and intelligence officials.
The F.B.I. recently opened an office in Algiers in an attempt to foster improved information-sharing between Algeria and the United States, as well as France. “We’re trying to make this like an extended family,” said Thomas Fuentes, the F.B.I.’s director of international operations.
The Rest @
Their nationalist battle against the Algerian military was faltering. “We didn’t have enough weapons,” recalled a former militant lieutenant, Mourad Khettab, 34. “The people didn’t want to join. And money, we didn’t have enough money.”
Then the leader of the group, a university mathematics graduate named Abdelmalek Droukdal, sent a secret message to Iraq in the fall of 2004.
The recipient was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, and the two men on opposite ends of the Arab world engaged in what one firsthand observer describes as a corporate merger.
Today, as Islamist violence wanes in some parts of the world, the Algerian militants — renamed Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb — have grown into one of the most potent Osama bin Laden affiliates, reinvigorated with fresh recruits and a zeal for Western targets.
Their gunfights with Algerian forces have evolved into suicide truck bombings of iconic sites like the United Nations offices in Algiers. They have kidnapped and killed European tourists as their reach expands throughout northern Africa.
Last month, they capped a string of attacks with an operation that evoked the horrors of Iraq:
...a pair of bombs outside a train station east of Algiers, the second one timed to hit emergency responders. A French engineer and his driver were killed by the first bomb; the second one failed to explode....
The transformation of the group from a nationalist insurgency to a force in the global jihad is a page out of Mr. bin Laden’s playbook: expanding his reach by bringing local militants under the Qaeda brand.
The Algerian group offers Al Qaeda hundreds of experienced fighters and a potential connection to militants living in Europe.
Over the past 20 months, suspects of North African origin have been arrested in Spain, France, Switzerland and Italy, although their connection to the Algerians is not always clear.
The inside story of the group, pieced together through dozens of interviews with militants and with intelligence, military and diplomatic officials, shows that the Algerians’ decision to join Al Qaeda was driven by both practical forces and the global fault line of Sept. 11, 2001.
Mr. Droukdal cited religious motivations for his group’s merger with Al Qaeda. Some militants also said that Washington’s designation of the Algerians as a terrorist organization after Sept. 11 — despite its categorization by some American government experts as a regional insurgency — had the effect of turning the group against the United States.
“If the U.S. administration sees that its war against the Muslims is legitimate, then what makes us believe that our war on its territories is not legitimate?” Mr. Droukdal said in an audiotape in response to a list of questions from The New York Times, apparently his first contact with a journalist.
“Everyone must know that we will not hesitate in targeting it whenever we can and wherever it is on this planet,” he said.
Interviews with American, European and Arab officials and a former lieutenant in Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb indicate that more opportunistic factors were at play in the growth of the group.
A long-running government offensive against the Algerian insurgents had nearly crushed the group, officials said. They needed the al Qaeda imprimatur to raise money and to shed their outlaw status in radical Muslim circles as a result of their slaughtering of civilians in the 1990s.
The Iraq war also was drawing many of the group’s best fighters, according to Mr. Khettab and a militant who trained Algerians in Iraq for Mr. Zarqawi.
Embracing the global jihad was seen as a way to keep more of these men under the Algerian group’s control and recruit new members.
Then, in March 2004, a covert American military operation led to the capture of one of the group’s top deputies. A few months later, Mr. Droukdal reached out to Mr. Zarqawi to get the man released. Mr. Zarqawi seized the opportunity to convince him that Al Qaeda could revive his operations, a former top leader of the Algerian group says.
Just as the Qaeda leadership has been able to reconstitute itself in Pakistan’s ungoverned tribal areas, Al Qaeda’s North Africa offshoot is now running small training camps for militants from Morocco, Tunisia and as far away as Nigeria, according to the State Department and Mr. Droukdal. The State Department in April categorized the tribal areas and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb as the two top hot spots in its annual report on global terrorism.
The threat is felt most acutely in Europe and in particular in France, which ruled Algeria for 132 years until 1962 and is a major trading partner with the authoritarian government in Algiers.
“We’re under a double threat now,” Bernard Squarcini, chief of France’s domestic and police intelligence service, said in an interview. “A group that had limited its terrorist activities to Algeria is now part of the global jihad movement.”
Last month, France signed military and nuclear development agreements with Algeria. Washington has also provided training to the Algerian military, and American companies have supplied equipment.
Even so, Western intelligence and diplomatic officials say the Algerian government has balked at making them full partners in investigating the group. Officials spoke only on the condition of anonymity because of security concerns.
In Europe, the authorities are eyeing the Algerian group warily, but are not convinced that the group can strike outside Africa.
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said last week that the merger of Al Qaeda with the Algeria organization and others like it brought fresh risks.
“These groups, as best we can tell, have a fair amount of independence. They get inspiration, they get sometimes guidance, probably some training, probably some money from the Al Qaeda leadership,” he said, adding that “it’s not as centralized a movement as it was, say, in 2001. But in some ways, the fact that it has spread in the way that it has, in my view, makes it perhaps more dangerous.”
Adopting Qaeda Tactics
Last Christmas Eve, five French tourists from Lyon were picnicking in midafternoon near the town of Aleg in Mauritania, some 1,700 miles southwest of Algiers. Suddenly, they were ambushed by three men in a black Mercedes. One of the gunmen turned an AK-47 on the tourists, killing four and wounding the fifth, French investigators said.
“It was total horror,” said François Tollet, 74, a retired chemist who lost his two sons, a brother and a friend in the attack. He survived when the body of one of his sons fell on him. The gunmen fled across Senegal and Gambia before they were captured in an operation directed by French intelligence in Guinea-Bissau; agents determined that the men belonged to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. (Maghreb refers to the western edge of the Arab world.)
The attack reflected what officials and militants say are the group’s tentacles in the northern tier of Africa. Camps in Mali, for example, are being used to begin operations in Algeria and Mauritania, according to French intelligence.
Mr. Droukdal described a growing network of militants only partly controlled by his far-flung deputies — the kind of autonomous jihad cells that counterterrorism officials say are particularly hard to combat. His comments to The Times included an audio file that was verified by a private voice expert who works for federal agencies. The Times also reviewed a set of 12 photographs sent by the group to verify Mr. Droukdal’s identity.
Asked about the slayings in Mauritania, he said, “The brothers implementing the process are connected with us, and we have previously trained some of them, and we offer them adequate support for the implementation of such operations.”
The epicenter of the group remains in the hills east of Algiers, where the roads are blocked by skittish police officers who finger their rifle triggers when cars approach. “Who told you to get out of the car?” a checkpoint officer yelled at one driver, backing away as the other guards swung their weapons into the faces of the passengers.
Inside police headquarters in nearby Naciria, the commander said he was so busy battling militants that he had no time to hang photographs of three officers killed in recent suicide bombings. “These terrorists don’t know any mercy,” he said. “This is Al Qaeda, what do you think?”
Even as the group expands its ambitions beyond Algeria, parts of the country remain a bleak battleground between militants and an oppressive government that follows its citizens and limits political opposition.
The Algerian government killed or captured an estimated 1,100 militants last year — nearly double the number in 2006, according to the State Department. But the group has begun using sophisticated recruitment videos to replenish its ranks with a new generation of youth that the State Department says is “more hard-line.”
The group has also benefited from a national amnesty program. Wanted posters at police stations and checkpoints include numerous men who were pardoned and released only to join the new Qaeda franchise.
American military officials estimate that the group now has 300 to 400 fighters in the mountains east of Algiers, with another 200 supporters throughout the country. Led by Mr. Droukdal, 38, an explosives expert who joined the insurgency 12 years ago, the group has shifted to tactics “successfully employed by insurgents and terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan,” according to the State Department.
In adopting these Qaeda-style tactics, it staged at least eight suicide bombings with vehicles last year, including two sets of attacks in central Algiers on the 11th of April and December, dates that now fill Algerians with dread. It dispatched the country’s first individual suicide bomber, who singled out President Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria.
The group has also stepped up its use of remote-controlled roadside bombs, and there are increasingly deadly clashes with militias armed by the government to fight the militants.
“We don’t arrest them anymore,” said Mohammad Mendri, 65, the mayor of a village who leads a militia near the coastal city of Jijel. “We just kill them.”
Its list of Western targets is growing. In December 2006, militants bombed a bus carrying workers with an affiliate of Halliburton, an American oil services company.
Other attacks killed Russian and Chinese workers. North African men trained in the group’s camps shot at the Israeli Embassy in Mauritania’s capital, Nouakchott. The group is also holding two Austrian tourists whom they kidnapped in Tunisia in February.
Its most audacious attack came last December when suicide bombers struck the United Nations and court offices in Algiers, killing 41 people and injuring 170 others. The attack drew praise from Mr. bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, who compared it to the 2003 bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad by Mr. Zarqawi.
A Merger’s Rocky Start
The on-and-off relationship between Al Qaeda and the Algerian militants began more than a decade ago. In 1994, Mr. bin Laden was looking for a new base to set up operations for his fledgling group. Algeria, with its rugged terrain and proximity to Europe, was an ideal spot.
Already, some 1,500 Algerian Islamists had returned home after helping the C.I.A. force the Soviets from Afghanistan. The men helped form a coalition of militants called the Armed Islamic Group. They took up arms in the insurgency against Algeria’s military-backed government in a conflict that has left more than 100,000 dead.
Mr. bin Laden, in Sudan at the time, asked the militants to let him move to a mountainous area they controlled, according to Mr. Khettab, the former top militant leader. J. Cofer Black, who was stationed in Khartoum for the C.I.A., said he never heard this account, but found it plausible. “We knew he was looking for some place to go,” Mr. Black said.
Mr. Khettab said the militants turned down Mr. bin Laden. “We refused, and said we don’t have anything to do with anything outside,” he said. “We are interested in just Algeria.”
The West was already deeply concerned about the rise of radical Islam in Algeria. In 1991, an Islamic political party trounced Algeria’s secular government in national polling, and the Algerian military blocked the elections.
Moderate Arab states, along with Europe and Washington, feared the installation of a fundamentalist Islamic republic on the model of Iran or Sudan and backed the government.
The crisis escalated further when violence spread to Europe. In late 1994, Armed Islamic Group gunmen hijacked an Air France jet bound for Paris intending to use it as a missile before they were killed during a stop in Marseille, according to French security officials. The following summer, three Paris bombings killed eight people and injured dozens.
Algeria’s military turned to infiltrators to help defeat the group from within, according to accounts from three high-level defectors from the Algerian Army and security service. Several massacres of villagers, for which the Islamic group was blamed, were believed to have been arranged by the military.
Even Mr. bin Laden and his backers denounced civilian killings as counterproductive to their cause, and the group withered. In 1998 a faction of militants created a new organization, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat.
The new group revived the guerrilla war against the government, with minimal singling out of civilians, according to two United States Air Force officers at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., who analyzed 10 years of its operations through early 2006. Their study concluded that the group “does not appear to be a ‘terrorist’ group as much as an internal insurgency against the government.”
The Bush administration took a different view of the group. On Sept. 23, 2001, President Bush included it on a list of organizations that “commit, threaten to commit or support terrorism.”
Shifting Strategies
The terrorist designation rankled Salafist group members, but there was dissent over whether to stay focused on the fight with the Algerian government. Two years later, the group’s leader, Nabil Sahraoui, issued a statement for the first time endorsing “Osama bin Laden’s jihad against the heretic America” and expressing his desire that the group join Al Qaeda. By this time, a United States Air Force general had the Algerian group in his sights.
“Africa had emerged strategically to the United States,” said Gen. Charles F. Wald, former deputy commander of the Pentagon’s European Command, which had responsibility for Africa.
“A significant amount of our energy is going to be coming from Africa in the future.”
The wide open spaces of the Sahara where arms, drugs and cigarette smugglers roam and tribal law reigns were also seen as potential jihadist havens. In March 2003, 32 European tourists were kidnapped there by one of the militant group’s top operatives.
“He was a very dynamic guy,” General Wald said of the kidnapper, Amari Saifi, who is known as El Para. “Could have played in a Hollywood movie. Handsome as hell. They’d take pictures of themselves out there posing.”
Expansion to Europe
Last December, French officials arrested eight men from Paris suburbs and seized:
- computers
- electronic material
- night-vision goggles
- global positioning equipment
- cellphones
- weapons-making machinery
- 20,000 euros, or about $30,000.
The Spanish police said they made a similar discovery in June when they arrested eight Algerian-born men on suspicion of providing financial and logistical support to the Algerian group.
European investigators are examining a group of Tunisians with alleged ties to the North African Qaeda operation who are suspected of running a fund-raising and recruitment cell stretching from Paris to Milan.
So far, despite its stated intentions to strike Europe and the rest of the West, investigators say they see little evidence that the North Africa branch of Al Qaeda is exporting fighters and equipment for an attack in Europe.
“Their ambition is to attack in Europe, but I wouldn’t hard-sell it,” said Gilles de Kerchove, the head of counterterrorism for the European Union. “I wouldn’t say AQIM is poised to attack in Europe.”
Although the Algerian government has been a ready trading partner with the West, it has been a reluctant ally in the West’s effort against the Qaeda group. Algerian officials have declined to share key information on the United Nations bombing and have also refused to release the names of insurgents it freed from prison, according to American diplomatic and intelligence officials.
The F.B.I. recently opened an office in Algiers in an attempt to foster improved information-sharing between Algeria and the United States, as well as France. “We’re trying to make this like an extended family,” said Thomas Fuentes, the F.B.I.’s director of international operations.
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