Algerian hostage crisis reveals latest theatre of war

Islamist guerrillas are turning the vast Sahara into a new theatre of war against the West, writes Alex Diaz

ISLAMIST guerrillas are turning the vast Sahara into a new theatre of war for an onslaught against Western interests in the region.

Exiled Algerian and Mauritanian jihadists, mercenaries who served in Libya under Muammar Gaddafi, and disaffected Tuareg tribesmen are at the forefront of the new struggle, according to Dr Berny Sèbe, an expert in Franco-African relations at the University of Birmingham.

Although these groups did not expect France to intervene in their struggle against the Malian government, they could take advantage of the situation to create a protracted conflict.

“The terrorist assault on a BP oil base in southern Algeria reminds us of the challenges posed by the immense desert space covered by the Sahara, where borders are difficult to guard, let alone to seal off.

“It also brings the issue of terrorist Islamist groups back to Algeria, where they developed in the early 1990s before the Algerian army routed them, forcing their relocation in Mali where ex-president Toumani Toure had the weakness to tolerate them.

“With the ongoing French-led intervention in Mali to help the central government contain Islamist attempts to take over the country, the Sahara is becoming a resourceful open space for terrorist organisations which will adapt their tactics to the new war conditions prevailing in the region.”

Dr Sèbe said: “Striking a BP base camp for oil workers a thousand miles from the Malian theatre of war sends a strong message about their determination and capability.

“Regardless of whether the attackers came from Mali or were a local affiliated group, they demonstrate their capacity to harm remains strong.”

The terrorist accused of ordering the attack is Mokhtar Belmokhtar — a one-eyed war veteran with the nickname “Mr Marlboro”.

He acquired the nickname because of his role in cigarette smuggling across the Sahel region to finance his jihad, now waged under the banner of the Signed-in-Blood Battalion.

“Belmokhtar has been active in political, ideological and criminal circles in the Sahara for the past two decades,” Jon Marks, an academic at the London-based think-tank Chatham House, told the BBC.

Born in Ghardaia in eastern Algeria in 1972, Belmokhtar — according to interviews posted on Islamist websites — was drawn to waging jihad while a schoolboy.

Inspired by the 1989 killing of Palestinian Islamist ideologue Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, he travelled to Afghanistan as a 19-year-old to receive training from al Qaeda.

“While there, Belmokhtar claims [on Islamist websites] to have made connections with jihadis from around the world,” says the US-based Jamestown Foundation.

“Moreover, Belmokhtar claims to have been to battlefronts ‘from Qardiz to Jalalabad to Kabul’.”

When he returned to Algeria in 1993, the country was already in the throes of conflict after the French-backed Algerian military annulled elections that the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) was poised to win.

Belmokhtar joined the conflict, which claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, and became a key figure in the militant Armed Islamist Group (GIA) and later the breakaway Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC).

When the GSPC merged with al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), he headed an AQIM battalion in the desert bordering Mauritania and Algeria. After AQIM was hit by in-fighting, he broke away to form the Signed-in-Blood Battalion last year, according to Mauritania’s Sahara Media news site.

Increasingly, Belmokhtar has gained notoriety as a hostage-taker across the Sahara, demanding multimillion-dollar ransoms from Western governments which — along with cigarette smuggling — finance his jihad.

Former UN Niger envoy Robert Fowler was captured by Belmokhtar loyalists outside Niger’s capital, Niamey, in Dec 2008.

“We were frog-marched and thrown into the back of a truck... We began our descent into hell — a 1,000km [600-mile] journey northwards, into the Sahara desert,” he told the BBC.

“I think I know instinctively what they [the latest hostages in Algeria] are going through.”

In its report, the Jamestown Foundation says Belmokhtar has been able to operate across borders because of his deep ties to the region.

“Key to Belmokhtar’s Saharan activities has been his strong connections with local Tuareg communities... Belmokhtar is reported to have married four wives from local Arab and Tuareg communities,” it said.

Sahara Media reports that after the AQIM splinter group the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (Mujao) took control of the northern city of Gao in Mali last year, Belmokhtar “joined the administration of the city”.

Last month, the Signed-in-Blood Battalion warned against any attempt to drive out the Islamists from northern Mali. “We will respond forcefully [to all attackers]; we promise we will follow you to your homes and you will feel pain and we will attack your interests,” the group said according to Sahara Media.

Last June, Algerian media reported that Belmokhtar — described in 2002 by French intelligence sources as “uncatchable” — had been killed in clashes between Islamists and Tuareg separatists in northern Mali.

But this turned out to be untrue, with Belmokhtar still a kingpin in the region.

“He is one of the best known warlords of the Sahara,” Stephen Ellis, an academic at the African Studies Centre in Leiden in the Netherlands, told Reuters.