Al Qaeda group renews deadly attacks

Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which has its origins in a campaign of terror that almost tore Algeria apart in the 1990s, has struck again with deadly force, including two attacks last week that left up to 60 dead.

AQIM appeared to take responsibility for both attacks in a taped message broadcast Friday by the Arab satellite channel Al-Jazeera.

It claimed the attacks on a police academy and army barracks on Aug. 19 and on a bus carrying workers for a Canadian engineering firm on Aug. 20 were in retaliation for a government crackdown on militants.

The tape could not be authenticated, but militants often use Al-Jazeera to post claims.

Authorities said the car bomb attacks bore all the hallmarks of the group.

AQIM is the successor to a terrorist group that battled the government in the 1990s after the military pre-empted elections that an Islamist coalition was poised to win.

Today, with the setbacks it has suffered in Iraq, North Africa is second only to Afghanistan and the mountainous tribal border regions of Pakistan as the focus of al Qaeda’s violent campaign.

“This is an extension of the insurgency - a civil war almost at times - that has been raging since the 1990s and never really stopped,” Steven Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations told United Press International of the recent bombings.

Beginning in 1992, the violence, led by fighters returning from the successful insurgency against the Soviets in Afghanistan and organized in the Armed Islamic Group, claimed more than 150,000 lives.

The violence spread to Europe in 1994, when gunmen hijacked an Air France jet bound for Paris.

In an eerie premonition of the Sept. 11 plot, the hijackers intended to crash the plane into Paris, said French security officials, but were killed when they stopped in Marseille.

The following year, bombings on the Paris metro killed eight people and injured dozens.

The group drew condemnation even from fellow extremists for its grisly mass killings of civilians, and in 1998 Hassan Hattab and others broke away, charging that its tactics - which they blamed in part on infiltration by the Algerian military - were alienating potential supporters.

Mr. Hattab formed the Group for Salafist Preaching and Combat, known by its French acronym GSPC, which renewed a guerrilla war against the government.

Terrorists in Algeria have a long-standing relationship with al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who reportedly contemplated moving his base there as an alternative to Afghanistan when he had to leave Sudan in the 1990s.

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