A group that had limited its activities to Algeria is now part of the global jihad
HIDING in caves and woodlands, Algerian insurgents were all but finished a few years ago.
Their nationalist battle against the Algerian military was faltering. "We didn't have enough weapons," says former militant lieutenant Mourad Khettab, 34. "T
he people didn't want to join. And 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 autumn 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 such as the United Nations offices in Algiers. They have kidnapped and killed European tourists as their reach expands throughout northern Africa.
The transformation of the group from a nationalist insurgency to a force in the global jihad is a page out of Bin Laden's playbook: expanding his reach by bringing local militants under the al-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 shows that the Algerians' decision to join al-Qaeda was driven by both practical forces and the global fault line of September 11, 2001.
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 organisation after September 11 – despite its categorisation by some American government experts as a regional insurgency – had the effect of turning the group against the United States.
"If the US administration sees that its war against the Muslims is legitimate, then what makes us believe that our war on its territories is not legitimate?" Droukdal said in an audiotape in response to a list of questions, 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."
A long-running government offensive against the Algerian insurgents had nearly crushed the group. They needed the al-Qaeda mark of approval 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 was also drawing many of the group's best fighters, according to Khettab. 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, Droukdal reached out to Zarqawi to get the man released. Zarqawi seized the opportunity to convince him that al-Qaeda could revive his operations.
Just as the al-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 US State Department and Droukdal. The State Department in April categorised 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."
In June, 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.
US Defence Secretary Robert Gates said that the merger of al-Qaeda with the Algeria organisation 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.
"It's not as centralised 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."
Droukdal describes a growing network of militants who are only partly controlled by his far-flung deputies – the kind of autonomous jihad cells that counterterrorism officials say are particularly hard to combat.
Asked about the slayings of five French tourists on Christmas Eve 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 epicentre 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 US State Department says is "more hard-line".
The group has also benefited from a national amnesty programme. Wanted posters at police stations and checkpoints include numerous men who were pardoned and released only to join the new al-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 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 US State Department.
In adopting these al-Qaeda-style tactics, it staged at least eight suicide bombings with vehicles last year, including two sets of attacks in central Algiers on April 11 and December 11, dates that now fill Algerians with dread. It dispatched the country's first individual suicide bomber, who singled out President Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria. At least 60 people have died this month in a string of suicide bombings.
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 any more," 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 bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, who compared it to the 2003 bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad by Zarqawi.
Although the Algerian government has been a ready trading partner with the West, it has been a reluctant ally in the West's efforts against the al-Qaeda group. Algerian officials have declined to share key information on the UN bombing and have also refused to release the names of insurgents it freed from prison, according to American diplomatic and intelligence officials.
The FBI recently opened an office in Algiers in an attempt to foster improved information-sharing between Algeria and the US, as well as France. "We're trying to make this like an extended family," said Thomas Fuentes, the FBI's director of international operations.
The tension between the Algerian government and its people continues. The government has reneged on public promises to spend more of its energy wealth on its unemployed youth, who are prime recruits for al-Qaeda, according to American intelligence analysts. The Algerian government, which would not comment for this article, minimises the threat. "Terrorism has been vanquished, despite the sporadic manifestation we are facing up to in the most energetic manner," President Bouteflika said in March.
But there is new evidence that al-Qaeda commanders see potential in its North African franchise.
Intelligence agents intercepted yet another message between headquarters and the Algeria branch this year. Zawahri sent Droukdal a private message, according to a top German intelligence official, noting that controversial Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad were set to be republished. He asked Droukdal to help in taking revenge.
Additional reporting by Michael Moss, Eric Schmitt, Elaine Sciolino and Margot Williams
The full article contains 1759 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
