A GROUP of light armoured vehicles skated over the moonscape of the Sahara, part of one of the largest detachments the French military has deployed in Niger since colonial times. Its mission is growing ever more urgent: to cut smuggling routes used by jihadis who have turned the inhospitable terrain into a sprawling security challenge for African and international forces alike.
Many of the extremist groups are affiliates of al-Qaeda, which has had roots in North Africa since the 1990s. With the recent introduction of Islamic State (IS) franchises, the jihadi push has been marked by increasing competition.
But, analysts and military officials say, there is also deepening collaboration among groups using modern communications and a sophisticated system of roving trainers to share military tactics, media strategies and ways of transferring money.
Their threat has grown as Libya — with its ungoverned spaces, oil, ports, and proximity to Europe and the Middle East — becomes a budding hub of operations for both al-Qaeda and IS to reach deeper into Africa. And as Africa’s jihadis come under the wing of distant and more powerful patrons, officials fear that they are extending their reach and stitching together their ambitions, turning once-local actors into pan-national threats.
The November 20 assault on the Radisson Blu hotel that killed at least 19 people in Bamako, Mali’s capital, was just one of the more spectacular recent examples of the ability of these groups to sow deadly mayhem. Across the region, hundreds of people have been killed in terrorist attacks in the past year.
Gen David Rodriguez, who heads US Africa Command, warned in a congressional statement last year of an "increasingly cohesive network of al-Qaeda affiliates and adherents" that "continues to exploit Africa’s undergoverned regions and porous borders to train and conduct attacks".
"Terrorists with allegiances to multiple groups are expanding their collaboration in recruitment, financing, training and operations, both within Africa and transregionally," Rodriguez warned months before the Mali attack.
...
THE transfer of expertise can be witnessed in the spread of suicide bombings in Libya, Tunisia and Chad, and in the growing use of improvised explosive devices in Mali, analysts and officials point out.
Such exchanges have been enhanced as groups shift shape, sometimes merge, and come under the wing of more powerful and distant patrons.
In one instance, two of the longest standing North African groups, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and Al-Mourabitoun, after a long publicised split, announced that they had reunited and that the Bamako hotel attack was their first joint venture.
The leaders of the two groups — Abdelmalek Droukdel and Mokhtar Belmokhtar, both Algerians — have loyalties that reach far beyond Africa, however.
As does Seifallah Ben Hassine, leader of Ansar al-Sharia in Tunisia, the organisation believed to be behind three deadly attacks in Tunisia last year including a massacre of 38 people at a beach resort in June and an attack on the Bardo Museum in Tunis in March that left 22 dead.
All three men are veterans of fighting in Afghanistan in the 1980s, swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden and now profess loyalty to al-Qaeda’s current leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, who is based in Pakistan.
Droukdel, routed by French forces in Mali in 2013, is reportedly holed up in mountains in southern Algeria. Belmokhtar and Ben Hassine have made rear bases in Libya, where they have been targeted by US air strikes. Despite French and US efforts to disrupt their networks, they still stretch across the continent.
To keep the pressure on the jihadis and help resist the threat, France has installed 3,500 troops across 10 bases and outposts in five vulnerable countries — Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso and Chad.
The recent French patrol, tiny dots in the Sahara’s expanse of dunes and blackened rock, included 30-tonne supply trucks carrying food and fuel and armoured vehicles mounted with 80mm cannons, as well as a medical truck.
Similarly, US special operations forces are working in Niger, and last year, US President Barack Obama ordered 300 US troops to Cameroon to help defend against the Nigerian Islamist movement Boko Haram, which has spread across borders.
...
FRENCH troops have led repeated operations to break communication and supply lines from Libya that have fortified such groups. The November operation was part of co-ordinated manoeuvres in eastern Mali and northern Niger to try to disrupt jihadi links between the two nations.
The smuggling route patrolled by the French is one of the main arteries for jihadis, arms and drugs. French troops call it the "autoroute" to southern Libya, which they describe as a "big supermarket" for weapons. The route crosses one of the most remote places on earth. Devoid of human habitation or water for hundreds of kilometres, it is a treacherous terrain of unbearable heat in the summer and nearly impossible navigation. Yet small convoys of smugglers attempt the crossing several times a week.
For the French, it is like looking for a tiny craft in an ocean, said Lt-Col Étienne du Peyroux, commanding officer leading the Niger operation.
"It is like a naval battle," he says, sketching out the hunt on maps on the hood of his desert jeep.
"The zone of operations is 40,000 square kilometres, an area the size of Holland, for 300 men. We try to find them, to block, to constrain, to work out how they will be channelled by a particular piece of terrain."
The French rarely catch anyone — the last capture was of a drug haul in June. But, they say, their operations are disrupting the jihadis’ movements, evidenced by a drop in traffic and tracks in the sand showing smugglers’ vehicles having turned back.
"We want them to abandon the fight, until they cannot do it any more or until the effort is too great," the colonel says. That, however, seems unlikely.
"Weak government and chaos are always conducive to terrorism," says Hans-Jakob Schindler, co-ordinator of a United Nations Security Council committee that monitors the al-Qaeda sanctions list. "These groups do take advantage of that."
The development of jihadi training camps in Libya over the past four years represented a regional and international threat, with particular significance for Africa, Schindler warned in a recent report.
Especially worrying, he said, were "the growing numbers of foreign terrorist fighters and the presence of a globalised group of terrorists from different al-Qaeda backgrounds".
North Africa and the Sahel with its difficult geography, impoverished populations and weak states, is acutely vulnerable, military and civilian analysts say. Poverty, corruption, poor government and unfair elections are all making populations susceptible to Islamist propaganda.
...
CERTAINLY, despite the interventions and improved security efforts, new groups and recruits continue to appear. Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and its affiliates remain active in Mali and they have sponsored a new group, the Massina Liberation Front, which has emerged in the past few months.
"They do not need much, they just need to be determined," says Col Louis Pena, a commander of French troops in N’Djamena, the capital of Chad.
The deepening reach of al-Qaeda and the arrival of IS are raising fresh alarm. While the two groups are rivals, that competition can pose a significant challenge from a broader security standpoint — as extremists seek to prove their potency and relevance, inspire and attract recruits, and play on a bigger stage.
The effect can be witnessed in Boko Haram’s six-year insurgency in Nigeria that has killed 17,000 people and displaced more than 1-million. Boko Haram has been around for two decades. But money and training from al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb gave its leader, Abubakar Shekau, a substantial boost when he assumed control in 2010.
Last year, Boko Haram switched allegiance to IS, which claimed its West Africa division had killed more than 1,000 people since November, according to the Site Intelligence Group, which monitors jihadi websites. Despite setbacks in Nigeria, it has become a regional scourge by exploiting contacts in the wider jihadi network, and it has now spilled into Chad, Cameroon and Niger.
New York Times
Malian soldiers display grenades and other supplies they said belonged to jihadists in front of the Radisson Blu hotel in Bamako, Mali. Picture: REUTERS/JOE PENNEY
A GROUP of light armoured vehicles skated over the moonscape of the Sahara, part of one of the largest detachments the French military has deployed in Niger since colonial times. Its mission is growing ever more urgent: to cut smuggling routes used by jihadis who have turned the inhospitable terrain into a sprawling security challenge for African and international forces alike.
Many of the extremist groups are affiliates of al-Qaeda, which has had roots in North Africa since the 1990s. With the recent introduction of Islamic State (IS) franchises, the jihadi push has been marked by increasing competition.
But, analysts and military officials say, there is also deepening collaboration among groups using modern communications and a sophisticated system of roving trainers to share military tactics, media strategies and ways of transferring money.
Their threat has grown as Libya — with its ungoverned spaces, oil, ports, and proximity to Europe and the Middle East — becomes a budding hub of operations for both al-Qaeda and IS to reach deeper into Africa. And as Africa’s jihadis come under the wing of distant and more powerful patrons, officials fear that they are extending their reach and stitching together their ambitions, turning once-local actors into pan-national threats.
The November 20 assault on the Radisson Blu hotel that killed at least 19 people in Bamako, Mali’s capital, was just one of the more spectacular recent examples of the ability of these groups to sow deadly mayhem. Across the region, hundreds of people have been killed in terrorist attacks in the past year.
Gen David Rodriguez, who heads US Africa Command, warned in a congressional statement last year of an "increasingly cohesive network of al-Qaeda affiliates and adherents" that "continues to exploit Africa’s undergoverned regions and porous borders to train and conduct attacks".
"Terrorists with allegiances to multiple groups are expanding their collaboration in recruitment, financing, training and operations, both within Africa and transregionally," Rodriguez warned months before the Mali attack.
...
THE transfer of expertise can be witnessed in the spread of suicide bombings in Libya, Tunisia and Chad, and in the growing use of improvised explosive devices in Mali, analysts and officials point out.
Such exchanges have been enhanced as groups shift shape, sometimes merge, and come under the wing of more powerful and distant patrons.
In one instance, two of the longest standing North African groups, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and Al-Mourabitoun, after a long publicised split, announced that they had reunited and that the Bamako hotel attack was their first joint venture.
The leaders of the two groups — Abdelmalek Droukdel and Mokhtar Belmokhtar, both Algerians — have loyalties that reach far beyond Africa, however.
As does Seifallah Ben Hassine, leader of Ansar al-Sharia in Tunisia, the organisation believed to be behind three deadly attacks in Tunisia last year including a massacre of 38 people at a beach resort in June and an attack on the Bardo Museum in Tunis in March that left 22 dead.
All three men are veterans of fighting in Afghanistan in the 1980s, swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden and now profess loyalty to al-Qaeda’s current leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, who is based in Pakistan.
Droukdel, routed by French forces in Mali in 2013, is reportedly holed up in mountains in southern Algeria. Belmokhtar and Ben Hassine have made rear bases in Libya, where they have been targeted by US air strikes. Despite French and US efforts to disrupt their networks, they still stretch across the continent.
To keep the pressure on the jihadis and help resist the threat, France has installed 3,500 troops across 10 bases and outposts in five vulnerable countries — Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso and Chad.
The recent French patrol, tiny dots in the Sahara’s expanse of dunes and blackened rock, included 30-tonne supply trucks carrying food and fuel and armoured vehicles mounted with 80mm cannons, as well as a medical truck.
Similarly, US special operations forces are working in Niger, and last year, US President Barack Obama ordered 300 US troops to Cameroon to help defend against the Nigerian Islamist movement Boko Haram, which has spread across borders.
...
FRENCH troops have led repeated operations to break communication and supply lines from Libya that have fortified such groups. The November operation was part of co-ordinated manoeuvres in eastern Mali and northern Niger to try to disrupt jihadi links between the two nations.
The smuggling route patrolled by the French is one of the main arteries for jihadis, arms and drugs. French troops call it the "autoroute" to southern Libya, which they describe as a "big supermarket" for weapons. The route crosses one of the most remote places on earth. Devoid of human habitation or water for hundreds of kilometres, it is a treacherous terrain of unbearable heat in the summer and nearly impossible navigation. Yet small convoys of smugglers attempt the crossing several times a week.
For the French, it is like looking for a tiny craft in an ocean, said Lt-Col Étienne du Peyroux, commanding officer leading the Niger operation.
"It is like a naval battle," he says, sketching out the hunt on maps on the hood of his desert jeep.
"The zone of operations is 40,000 square kilometres, an area the size of Holland, for 300 men. We try to find them, to block, to constrain, to work out how they will be channelled by a particular piece of terrain."
The French rarely catch anyone — the last capture was of a drug haul in June. But, they say, their operations are disrupting the jihadis’ movements, evidenced by a drop in traffic and tracks in the sand showing smugglers’ vehicles having turned back.
"We want them to abandon the fight, until they cannot do it any more or until the effort is too great," the colonel says. That, however, seems unlikely.
"Weak government and chaos are always conducive to terrorism," says Hans-Jakob Schindler, co-ordinator of a United Nations Security Council committee that monitors the al-Qaeda sanctions list. "These groups do take advantage of that."
The development of jihadi training camps in Libya over the past four years represented a regional and international threat, with particular significance for Africa, Schindler warned in a recent report.
Especially worrying, he said, were "the growing numbers of foreign terrorist fighters and the presence of a globalised group of terrorists from different al-Qaeda backgrounds".
North Africa and the Sahel with its difficult geography, impoverished populations and weak states, is acutely vulnerable, military and civilian analysts say. Poverty, corruption, poor government and unfair elections are all making populations susceptible to Islamist propaganda.
...
CERTAINLY, despite the interventions and improved security efforts, new groups and recruits continue to appear. Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and its affiliates remain active in Mali and they have sponsored a new group, the Massina Liberation Front, which has emerged in the past few months.
"They do not need much, they just need to be determined," says Col Louis Pena, a commander of French troops in N’Djamena, the capital of Chad.
The deepening reach of al-Qaeda and the arrival of IS are raising fresh alarm. While the two groups are rivals, that competition can pose a significant challenge from a broader security standpoint — as extremists seek to prove their potency and relevance, inspire and attract recruits, and play on a bigger stage.
The effect can be witnessed in Boko Haram’s six-year insurgency in Nigeria that has killed 17,000 people and displaced more than 1-million. Boko Haram has been around for two decades. But money and training from al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb gave its leader, Abubakar Shekau, a substantial boost when he assumed control in 2010.
Last year, Boko Haram switched allegiance to IS, which claimed its West Africa division had killed more than 1,000 people since November, according to the Site Intelligence Group, which monitors jihadi websites. Despite setbacks in Nigeria, it has become a regional scourge by exploiting contacts in the wider jihadi network, and it has now spilled into Chad, Cameroon and Niger.
New York Times
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